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CflpSRIGtlT BEPOSIK 



Keynote Studies in 
Keynote Books of the Bible 



The James Sprunt Lectures delivered at 
Union Theological Seminary in Virginia 

Keynote Studies 



in 



Keynote Books of the Bible 



By 
C. ALPHONSO SMITH, Ph. D., LL. D,, L. H. D. 

Head of the Department of English in the United States 

Naval Acade?ny, Annapolis, Md., and Author of 

" Studies in English Syntax" "Die Amerikanische 

Literature " What Can Literature Do For 

Me ? " "0. Henry Biography," etc. 




New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, ioto, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



r13 






New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago : 1 7 North Wabash Ave. 
London : 2 1 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh : 75 Princes Street 

©CU515621 



To the memory of 
my father 

y. Henry Smith, D. £)., 

with a sense of indebtedness that 
has grown with every passing year 
this book is dedicated in affectionate 
veneration 



THE JAMES SPRUNT LECTURES 

IN nineteen hundred and eleven Mr. James Sprunt 
of Wilmington, North Carolina, gave to the Trustees 
of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia the sum 
of thirty thousand dollars, for the purpose of establishing a 
perpetual lectureship, which would enable the institution 
to secure from time to time the services of distinguished 
ministers and authoritative scholars, outside the regular 
Faculty, as special lecturers on subjects connected with 
various departments of Christian thought and Christian 
work. The lecturers are chosen by the Faculty of the 
Seminary and a committee of the Board of Trustees, and 
the lectures are published after their delivery in accord- 
ance with a contract between the lecturer and these 
representatives of the institution. The sixth series of 
lectures on this foundation is presented in this volume. 

W. W. MOORE. 

President Union Theological 
Seminary in Virginia. 



Preface 

THESE lectures are a part of a course 
on the books of the Bible delivered 
before the Laymen's League of the 
Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Vir- 
ginia. They were revised for delivery on 
the James Sprunt Foundation at the Union 
Theological Seminary of Richmond, Vir- 
ginia, in March, 1917, and have been further 
revised for publication in book form. The 
initial lecture, however, on The Keynote 
Method, contains the plan and purpose to 
which I have tried to be constant from first 
to last. If in their present form these 
lectures or any one of them shall aid in 
bringing the Bible " home to men's business 
and bosoms," I shall be deeply grateful. 

C. A. S. 
United States Naval Academy, 

Annapolis, Md. 



t 



Contents 



I. 


The Keynote Method 


ii 


II. 


Genesis 


34 


III. 


Esther 


60 


IV. 


Job 


. 82 


V. 


Hosea 


in 


VI. 


The Gospel of John 


129 


VII. 


The Epistle to the Romans 


. 148 


VIII. 


The Epistle to the Philippians 


. 166 


IX. 


Revelation .... 


, 180 




Index 


, 201 



I 

THE KEYNOTE METHOD 

I 

ONE of the most interesting passages 
in Prescott's Conquest of Mexico is 
that in which he describes the bat- 
tle of Otumba. A mere handful of Spaniards 
confronted two hundred thousand Aztecs. 
Cortez thought, says Prescott, that his last 
hour had come. But he was to win " one of 
the most remarkable victories ever achieved 
in the New World." His method was essen- 
tially the method that we shall attempt to 
follow in our study of eight books of the 
Bible. Knowing that whatever stability or 
cohesiveness the Aztec armies had was due 
to the authority of their commanders, Cortez 
ordered his men not to waste their strength 
on the military underlings opposed to them 
but to seek, find, and strike down the leaders. 
One cacique was worth a thousand men. 
Had this plan not been followed it is not 
likely that a single Spaniard would have 

ii 



12 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

survived to tell the story of the battle of 
Otumba. 

Does not every masterpiece of literature 
whether of prose or verse contain some cen- 
tral and commanding thought that gives 
coherence and vitality to the whole? Is it 
possible to understand the parts without 
reference to their common contribution to a 
common end? Can we talk intelligently 
about the metre or rhythm or stanzaic 
structure of a poem if we ignore or make 
secondary the thought content to which 
these are but ancillary? Can we discuss 
understandingly the descriptive or narrative 
or argumentative skill of a writer, the mould 
of his paragraphs, the architecture of his 
sentences, or any other question relating to 
form, if we turn our eyes even for a moment 
from the thought goal to which he is driv- 
ing? And yet a well-known critic has said 
that literature is that kind of writing in 
which the form is of more importance than 
the content. It would be hard to pack more 
vacuity into an equal number of words. 
The man who defined classical music as the 
music that is better than it sounds was a 
kinsman but wiser. 

When Christ said, " Seek ye first the king- 
dom of God and his righteousness; and all 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 13 

these things shall be added unto you," He 
suggested the final solution of all the vexing 
problems that have gathered about the rela- 
tion of form and content The Master was 
not attempting to appraise the relative im- 
portance of " The kingdom of God " and 
" all these things." He was only telling 
how " all these things " could be secured. 
How? By attending to something else first. 
The something else in literature is thought 
content; "all these things" are the details ) 
of form. The question is not, Which is the j 
more important? but Which comes first?/ 
Priority not primacy is the solution. Put) 
first things first. 

II 
We are going to read and meditate to- 
gether eight masterpieces of the world's 
literature. They are Genesis, Esther, fob, 
Hosea, John, Romans, Philippians, and Revela- 
tion. We shall try to strike the keynote of 
each, to find its taproot, to chart its central 
current, to assimilate its pivotal thought, or, 
as Cortez might have put it, to capture its 
cacique. The task is difficult and I enter 
upon it with many misgivings. Nor am I 
sure that what may prove to be central in 
my thinking will be central in yours, or that 
what is central to you will be central to me. 



U KEYNOTE STUDIES 

I am heartened, however, in making the at- 
tempt by the conviction that the time is 
surely coming when all great literature will 
be studied in just this way. A few voices 
have already been raised in behalf of the 
thought content of literature. " The highest 
attribute of the poet, ,, says C. F. Johnson, 1 
" is thought power in the broad sense, that 
which coordinates multiform phenomena 
and refers them to law." Rudolph Eucken 2 
expresses it still more strongly : " In our 
opinion this setting aside of content con- 
stitutes a danger for that very independence 
of art in the interests of which it is de- 
manded. To become independent of mate- 
rial does not mean to attain pure independ- 
ence. An art devoted preponderatingly to 
form easily becomes a mere matter of pro- 
fessional dexterity, the first concern of which 
is to display (to itself if not to others) its 
own skill. This gives rise to a predilection 
for the eccentric, paradoxical, and exagger- 
ated, and, in seeking after effects of this 
kind, the promised freedom only too easily 
becomes merely another kind of dependence, 
a dependence of the artist upon others and 
upon his own moods. Genuine independ- 

1 " Elements of Literary Criticism." 
8 " Main Currents of Modern Thought." 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 15 

ence is to be found only when the creative 
work proceeds solely from an inner necessity 
of the artist's own nature. But this cannot 
take place unless there is something to say, 
nay, something to reveal. Mere virtuosity 
knows no such necessity." 

" So long as poetry is conceived as mere 
imitation," says Richard Green Moulton, 1 
" the emphasis is shifted from the matter to 
the manner of performance; more and more 
the spirit of connoisseurship turns from 
deeper things to delicate nuances of effect. 
If poetry is creation, the subject-matter 
takes the center of the field." A good sum- 
mary is given by C. T. Winchester : " We 
have a right to ask, then, of any work of 
literary art, however emotional in purpose, 
What does it mean? What truths does it 
embody and enforce? We shall find there 
is no eminence in literature without some- 
thing high or serious in its thought; and 
that, other things being equal, the value of 
all literature increases with the breadth and 
depth of the truth it contains." 

That these views have not always been 
held even by eminent critics is evidenced by 
the following interesting extract from the 

1 " The Modern Study of literature " 

2 " Some Principles of Literary Criticism." 



16 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

Journal of Edward Gibbon. Under date of 
October 3, 1762, he writes: "I was ac- 
quainted only with two ways of criticising a 
beautiful passage : the one, to show, by an 
exact anatomy of it, the distinct beauties of 
it, and whence they sprung; the other, an 
idle exclamation, or a general encomium, 
which leaves nothing behind it. Longinus 
has shown me that there is a third. He tells 
me his own feelings upon reading it; and 
tells them with such energy that he com- 
municates them." Is there not a fourth way 
and should it not come first? Let us try 
an illustration, beginning with Gibbon's 
three ways and taking as our " beautiful 
passage" Poe's lines: 

The glory that was Greece 

And the grandeur that was Rome. 

(1) An "anatomy" of this passage 
shows that its beauty is due in part to the 
perfect parallelism maintained, " glory " in 
the first line corresponding to " grandeur " 
in the second, and " Greece " in the first to 
" Rome " in the second. The contrast, too, 
between the accented vowels, the long o and 
e sounds and the short an sound, contributes 
its quota of sonant beauty. Further analy- 
sis reveals a distinctive appeal in the com- 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 17 

plete identification of glory with Greece and 
of grandeur with Rome. The poet had first 
written 

The beauty of fair Greece 
And the grandeur of old Rome ; 

but he vastly increased the effectiveness of 
his lines when he replaced " beauty " with 
" glory," and " of fair " and " of old " with 
" that was," thus making glory the very 
synonym of Greece and grandeur only an- 
other name for Rome. 

(2) This has always seemed to me one 
of the most beautiful passages in American 
literature. How satisfying, how haunting, 
how magical is the phrasing ! "Two mighty 
lines," says Edwin Markham, " that com- 
press into a brief space all the rich, high 
magnificence of dead centuries.' , They are 
" reserved for immortality," says the Eng- 
lish critic, J. M. Robertson. They bear 
" the seal of ultimate perfection," writes 
C. L. Moore. 

(3) Whenever I read these lines, Greece 
in all her splendor and Rome in all her great- 
ness seem summoned back. I feel like writ- 
ing the first line in every Greek history that 
I may hereafter read and the second in every 
Roman history. They stimulate my imagina- 



18 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

tion by opening vast vistas of buried history 
and by pointing out the best angles of vision. 
(4) But these are mere bypaths of in- 
terpretation, for Poe is not thinking pri- 
marily of Greece or of Rome. He is trying 
to express the effect upon himself of the 
beauty of a friend whom he calls Helen. 
Till he saw Helen, the story of Greece and 
Rome had been only a tale that was told. 
The incomparable art of the one and the 
lofty achievement of the other, a blend of 
ideal beauty and of ordered power, had 
alike passed him by. Now it is different. A 
new faculty has been released. Helen has 
brought him home 

To the glory that was Greece 
And the grandeur that was Rome. 

When probed for their central meaning, 
therefore, the lines make it clear that the 
goal of Poe's thought was not Greece or 
Rome. It was the interpretation of Helen's 
beauty in terms of Greece and Rome. Till 
this thought is made central and controlling, 
all " ways of criticising " will be misdirected. 
One has only to glance at some of the 
laboriously introduced and minutely anno- 
tated editions of literature that flood the 
markets to-day to see that thought content 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 19 

has not yet come into its own. Here is a 
select edition of Sidney Lanier's poems with 
introduction, notes, and bibliography. I 
turn to that great sonnet, called The Mocking- 
Bird: 

Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray 
That o'er the general leafage boldly grew, 
He summ'd the woods in song ; or typic drew 
The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay 
Of languid doves when long their lovers stray 
And all birds' passion-plays that sprinkle dew 
At morn in brake or bosky avenue. 
Whate'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could 

say. 
Then down he shot, bounced airily along 
The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made 

song 
Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art 

again. 
Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain : 
How may the death of that dull insect be 
The life of yon trim Shakespeare on the tree ? 

What is the theme or core of this sonnet 
as a whole? Plainly the thought launched 
in the last three lines. Lanier was thinking 
and wished to make us think of those myriad 
alchemies of nature that transcend and defy 
the chemistries of man. How is the insen- 
sate clod transformed through fruit and 



20 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

grain and flesh into brain and thought and 
joy? Or, to stage it differently, how is the 
song of the most graceful and melodious of 
birds vitalized by the carcass of the most 
awkward and cacophonous of insects? Can 
science tell? " Why may not imagination," 
says Hamlet, " trace the noble dust of Alex- 
ander till he find it stopping a bung-hole? 
. . . As thus : Alexander died, Alexander 
was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; 
the dust is earth ; of earth we make loam ; 
and why of that loam, whereto he was con- 
verted, might they not stop a beer-barrel? ' 
They might, but imagination finds little 
profit in tracing downward. It is the up- 
ward tracings that lead us out into the in- 
finite. But how does our annotator make 
clear the central thought of The Mocking- 
Bird? He says nothing about it but he re- 
fers us to books and encyclopedias on birds 
in general, to English poems about the sky- 
lark and nightingale, and to thirty- two Amer- 
ican poems and prose selections about the 
mocking-bird. Centrifugal criticism could 
hardly go further. Indeed one is surprised 
that in the four pages of notes no parallel 
reading about the grasshopper was sug- 
gested. 

Let us take a still greater poem, probably 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 21 

the greatest poem of equal length in all 
literature. I mean Gray's Elegy Written in a 
Country Churchyard, Longfellow tells us of 
the children who, coming home from school, 
used to look in at the open door of the black- 
smith's shop 

And catch the burning sparks that fly- 
Like chaff from a threshing floor. 

They of course cared nothing for the shape 
that was being forged : they were interested 
only in the sparks. Does not Gray's Elegy 
survive to-day chiefly in sparks, in frag- 
mentary quotations? Here again the parallel 
reading assigned in annotated editions is not 
really parallel. It is essentially unrelated. 
Parallel reading, if it means anything, means 
reading that follows the same trajectory of 
thought. It means reading that illuminates 
and is illuminated by the masterpiece with 
which we start. Does Milton's Lycidas or 
Shelley's Adonais or Tennyson's In Memoriam, 
great as they are, treat the theme treated 
by Gray? I think not. The fact that all 
are elegies is negligible. It was this con- 
fusion of title and theme, of name and sub- 
stance, that led the annotator of The Mock- 
ing-Bird to class the poem as a study in 
ornithology. Of course a reading of other 



22 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

great elegies will serve to bring out the con- 
trast between them and Gray's work. But 
so will the reading of poems that are not 
elegies. Parallel reading, if it is not to be 
sapless and unprocreant, if it is to do more 
than merely satisfy a routine academic re- 
quirement, must be suggested rather than 
imposed, and suggested by the nature of the 
thought that we are trying to assimilate. 

What now is Gray's central plea in his 
greatest poem? Notice that he did not call 
his lines merely an elegy but an Elegy Written 
in a Country Churchyard. No poet, certainly 
not one of Gray's fastidiousness, would have 
given his lines so long and detailed a title 
without having in mind a definite purpose. 
No other elegy tells in its title where it was 
written. But in this elegy the place was 
essential, for this elegy dares to pit the 
neglected churchyard against Westminster 
Abbey. It is the most democratic poem in 
the English language. Its plea is not for the 
living few who have not a fair chance but for 
the unnumbered dead of all times and climes 
who did not have a fair chance. These lines 
strike the keynote: 

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 

Some heart once pregnant with celestial 
fire; 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 23 

Hands that the rod of empire might have 
sway'd, 
Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre. 

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, 
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er 
unroll ; 

Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage, 
And froze the genial current of their soul. 

Other elegies are individual; this is uni- 
versal. Gray is championing the cause of 
the potentially great against the actually 
great. The difference, he says, is not in 
native worth but in relative opportunity for 
self-development, not in breed but in pas- 
ture. Those who lie in Westminster Abbey 
belonged to the privileged class. Given 
equal opportunity those who lie beneath the 
unlettered texts of Stoke Pogis or of any 
other neglected churchyard might have been 
sepulchred with equal acclaim and beneath 
an equal glory of bronze and marble. In- 
stead of parallel reading, go out and stand 
in such a cemetery as Gray describes and 
think the poet's thoughts after him. It will 
temper your estimate of class distinctions; 
it will widen and deepen your sympathies; 
it may even dedicate you to the task of help- 
ing potential greatness to become actual 



24 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

greatness. Such a poem sends a challenge to 
every school and church and government in 
the world. If parallel reading be insisted 
on, let it not be other elegies. Let it rather 
be such trumpet calls as Burns sounded in A 
Man's a Man for a* That or Jefferson in The 
Declaration of Independence or Gray himself in 
The Alliance of Education and Government, 

III 

That the Bible surpasses in the value and 
potency of its thought content all other 
literature does not need to be reaffirmed. I 
yield to no one in my admiration of the 
classical literatures or of the modern litera- 
tures or of the more technical literature of 
scientific achievement. But in vividness and 
intensity, in elevation of appeal, in the ex- 
tent of her literary empire, and in the dura- 
tion of her sovereignty, the Bible takes easy 
and secure precedence. The most advanced 
nations of the world are the children of her 
fireside; the centuries themselves have been 
but handmaidens in her service. There is 
no modern literature worthy the name that 
has not felt her influence. There is no 
regnant people whose strivings she has not 
shepherded. 

But the individual books of the Bible are 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 25 

not so well known as wholes as are other 
masterpieces of far less significance. Ask 
the average reader or student to give you 
the central content of Hamlet, Evangeline, 
Pippa Passes, Silas Marner, Peer Gynt, Mr. 
Britling Sees It Through, and, if he has read 
them, you will get better answers than if 
you ask him about the distinctive content of 
Ezra, Isaiah, Joel, Haggai, Colossians, Jude. 
The reasons for this difference seem to me 
many. In the first place, our sense of the 
unique unity and authoritativeness of the 
Bible as a whole has dwarfed our feeling for 
the distinctive content of the sixty-six book 
units. WfLforget that Jhe^ merL-wJaa^wrote 
or compiled these books did so not because 
they had to say something but because they 
had something to^say^ We^think of the 
Bible and read it not as a library but as a 
book, though in derivation and in essential 
content it is a collection of books rather than 
one book. To search the Bible for favorite 
verses, to listen Sunday after Sunday to the 
exposition of select texts, to follow the Sun- 
day School method of long jumps and short 
pauses will undoubtedly store the mind with 
vital truth. But this is not enough, and the 
writers of the Bible would be the first to 
protest. Every method of Bible study is in 



26 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

its very nature inadequate if it ignores the 
larger and creative or superintending pur- 
pose that gave beginning and ending and 
distinctive message to each book. 

Even when the Bible is read through once 
a year or at shorter intervals, it is not read 
with anything like the attention to its con- 
stituent parts that we give to a like reading 
of Shakespeare or Emerson or Ibsen. Have 
you ever in reading the Bible paused after 
each book and asked yourself: What does 
this book say that no other book of the 
sixty-six says or says so well? If this book 
had not been written, how and where would 
the Biblical structure be weakened? If this 
were the only book of the Bible left to us, 
how much of the rest could we reconstruct? 
If nothing else were known about the author 
except that he wrote this book, how much 
of his personality could we gather from it? 

But our familiarity or unfamiliarity with 
the Bible is not due chiefly to methods of 
reading it through. It comes to us, as has 
been already said, by ways far more hostile 
to thought content. The story is told of a 
Scotch minister who used to take snuff so 
habitually that he ignored the proprieties of 
both time and place. " My text this morn- 
ing," he once announced, " you will find in 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 27 

these words : ' Here a little and there a 
little/ ' each little being illustrated by a 
corresponding pinch and inhalation. We 
illustrate the text differently but none the 
less habitually. The current method of 
Bible study, if it may be called such, is a 
hop-skip-and-jump method. No other book, 
except a dictionary, a cook book, or a volume 
of popular quotations, is used in the same 
way. 

The popular attitude toward the book of 
Jonah will illustrate. You will not find in all 
literature another so flagrant example of the 
havoc wrought by nibbling, halting, piece- 
meal interpretation. If Jonah had not been 
one of the books of the Bible, its central 
content may very well have been differently 
interpreted by different readers, just as 
Hauptmann's Sunken Bell or Maeterlinck's 
Blue Bird is differently interpreted by dif- 
ferent readers ; but the interpretation would 
at least have been an honest attempt to ap- 
praise the message of the work as a whole. 
As it is, one incident has been wrested from 
its setting and made to connote the meaning 
and mission of the entire book. There are 
times when the book of Jonah seems to me 
the most uplifting book in the Old Testa- 
ment. It is an epitome of history, world 



28 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

history and individual history. It is the age- 
long conflict between the liberal God and 
illiberal man. Nowhere else in the Old 
Testament does God appear more godlike 
or human nature more human. In no other 
book is the writer's purpose clearer or more 
modernly helpful. No other book is in more 
exact accord with our highest imaginings of 
God or with our sifted and ultimate knowl- 
edge of man. But the popular interpreta- 
tion stops abruptly with the appearance of 
the " great fish." If parallel reading were 
to be popularly assigned it would be a course 
in ichthyology. There would be nothing 
spiritual in it. And this attitude is due 
chiefly to the current discontinuity and lack 
of totality with which the Bible is read and 
interpreted. I can find no analogy outside 
of the Bible to this particular kind of mis- 
interpretation. 

Another influence at work is not popular 
but scholarly. It is the so-called higher 
criticism. This criticism is to-day still in 
the fragmentary stage. It is making bricks 
rather than building temples. The thrill of 
supposed discovery induces in the higher 
critic an over-valuation of the part as against 
the balanced appraisal of the whole. Higher 
criticism has achieved much and will, I hope, 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 29 

achieve more. But at present it is stronger 
in minutiae than in wholes, in finding than in 
correlating, in the hurrah of exploitation 
than in the hush of interpretation. Some- 
times it is a word that derails the critical 
judgment, sometimes an incident. Take the 
word " holy." It is, as you know, one of 
the distinctions of Isaiah that he is pre- 
eminently " the prophet of holiness." One 
does not have to be a Hebrew scholar to 
know what Isaiah means by " holy." Its 
orbit, like the orbit of other words, can be 
traced accurately in its use. It bears its 
credentials with it. Read Isaiah through 
from beginning to end and you will have a 
far better idea of what he means by " holy " 
than will the philologist who knows the 
original meaning of the word bujj&ha. is 
wedded to. .the con vi£tioii4hat words neyer 
throw ojff th^halo^or halter of their firjst 
meanings. 

The following paragraph is an illustra- 
tion: 1 "When we learn that the root-word 
for 'holy* is the same throughout the 
Semitic group of languages, and that in 
Assyrian, for example, it is used in one form 
to designate a ' prostitute ' or ' harlot/ we 

*J. M. Powis Smith in "A Guide to the Study of the 
Christian Religion " (1916), p. 140. 



30 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

get a new point of view for the interpreta- 
tion of the Hebrew word." I think not. The 
word " holy " in Hebrew, like " sacer " in 
Latin and " hagios " in Greek and " taboo" 
in Polynesian, meant originally " set apart 
for a definite purpose." The purpose might 
be good or bad. The word was ritualistic 
rather than ethical. But in Hebrew the 
ethical meaning soon dwarfed the ritualistic 
and in Isaiah's use " holy " plainly includes 
the whole circuit of moral and spiritual per- 
fection. The knowledge of the original or 
etymological meaning of Hebrew " holy ,! 
does not give us " a new point of view for 
the interpretation of the Hebrew word." 
It is only another illustration of the well 
known principle of semantics that the first 
meaning of a word, while often interesting 
and even prophetic, will prove a barrier to 
interpretation if you carry it over into later 
meanings. The first meaning is a .spring- 
board, >not a h^rnes^. 

Our word " devout " has followed the well 
beaten highway of Hebrew " holy." It 
meant originally " set apart, devoted or 
vowed to," and the person or thing could be 
vowed to Satan as well as to God. In fact 
Sheldon * speaks of those who were not the 
1 " Miracles of Antichrist " (1616). 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 31 

ordinary followers of Antichrist " but his 
special devouts." Suppose now that in an 
obituary of some dear friend of yours the 
writer had frequently used the word " de- 
vout." What would you think of the man 
who should whisper in your ear — " You will 
get a new point of view for the interpreta- 
tion of this word ' devout ' if you will re- 
member that originally it could be applied 
to devotees of the devil " ? 

But the higher criticism, in its search for 
proof-texts, misinterprets an incident as 
often as a mere word. The reason is the 
same in both cases : the part is exalted above 
the whole. And the remedy is the same : 
read the entire book and interpret the part 
in the light of the whole, not the whole in ,i 
the light of the part. Difficulties of inter- 
pretation, if soluble at all, will be found 
soluble in the waters of the central current 
rather than in the brackish pools along the 
shore. A recent critic, 1 for example, at- 
tempts to prove that in the older Old Testa- 
ment books " Jahveh is the God of Palestine 
only, being more or less localized at Sanctu- 
aries within its borders." His power, in 
other words, was not supposed to extend be- 

x See "The Old Testament in the Light of To- 
day," by William Frederic Bade, chapter III. 



32 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

yond the limits of the Holy Land. " The 
fact/' he adds, " that Jahveh and his wor- 
ship were popularly believed to be insepa- 
rable from Palestine may be illustrated by a 
number of interesting passages." 

The incidents cited are three. In the first, 
Cain is speaking: " Behold, thou hast driven 
me out this day from the face of the ground ; 
and from thy face shall I be hid ; and I shall 
be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth; 
and it will come to pass, that whosoever 
flndeth me will slay me " (Genesis 4 : 14). In 
the second passage the Philistines are the 
speakers: "And see; if it [the ark of the 
Lord] goeth up by the way of its own bor- 
der to Bethshemesh, then he hath done us 
this great evil: but if not, then we shall 
know that it is not his hand that smote 
us; it was a chance that happened to us ,! 
(1 Samuel 6:9). In the third passage David 
speaks to Saul : " They have driven me out 
this day that I should not cleave unto the 
inheritance of Jehovah, saying, Go, serve 
other gods. Now therefore, let not my 
blood fall to the earth away from the pres- 
ence of Jehovah " (1 Samuel 26 : 19-20). 

It does not seem to me that these inci- 
dents, though torn from their setting, prove 
or even make plausible the author's conten- 



THE KEYNOTE METHOD 33 

tion. They illustrate not the Tightness of 
his view but the wrongness of his method. 
They but emphasize the need of standardiz- 
ing our interpretation of particular incidents 
by weighing them in the scales of the book 
units as wholes. A reading of Genesis entire 
and of 1 Samuel entire will not only make 
the meaning of these incidents plain but will, 
in our judgment, establish the exact reverse 
of what the author seeks to prove. Synec-\ 
doche, or the use of a part for the whole, is 
a figure of speech that belongs to rhetoric, 
not to logic, certainly not to hermeneutics. 

IV 
Photographers tell us that the airplane 
will soon inaugurate a new kind of photog- 
raphy. The bird's-eye view, the view of the 
lower from the realm of the higher, has 
hitherto been the privilege of the bird alone. 
It will soon be man's privilege. "VYe shall 
see more because we shall see less. No book 
offers so much to the View from the heights 
as does the Bible; no writers have suffered 
more from the partial view than the writers 
of the books of the Bible; and no time has 
called more loudly for the release of the 
larger view than the time in which we live. 



II 

GENESIS 

i 

NO single chapter in the Old Testa- 
ment so impresses me with its 
inherent greatness as the first 
chapter of Genesis. Some of the Psalms and 
a few chapters in Isaiah strike a note of 
higher rhapsody. In sheer intellectuality 
the twentieth chapter of Bxodus goes beyond 
it. But in its blend of beauty and power, in 
the recurrent beat of its planetary rhythms, 
in the consciousness of a great truth ade- 
quately embodied at last, in a certain proud 
disdain of all embellishment except that 
which attends unsolicited upon great 
thought greatly expressed, the first chapter 
of Genesis seems to me alone and unap- 
proached. 

In the beginning God created the heaven 
and the earth. And the earth was without 
form, and void; and darkness was upon the 
face of the deep. And the Spirit of God 
moved upon the face of the waters. And 
God said, Let there be light: and there was 

34 



GENESIS 35 

light. And God saw the light, that it was 
good: and God divided the light from the 
darkness. And God called the light Day, 
and the darkness he called Night. And the 
evening and the morning were the first day. 

And God said, Let there be a firmament in 
the midst of the waters, and let it divide the 
waters from the waters. And God made the 
firmament and divided the waters which were 
under the firmament from the waters which 
were above the firmament: and it was so. 
And God called the firmament Heaven. 
And the evening and the morning were the 
second day. 

And God said, Let the waters under the 
heaven be gathered together unto one rjlace, 
and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 
And God called the dry land Earth ; and the 
gathering together of the waters called he 
Seas: and God saw that it was good. And 
God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the 
herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yield- 
ing fruit after his kind, whose seed is in 
itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And 
the earth brought forth grass, and herb yield- 
ing seed after his kind, and the tree yield- 
ing fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his 
kind: and God saw that it was good. And 
the evening and the morning were the third 
day. 

And God said, Let there be lights in the 



36 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

firmament of the heaven to divide the day 
from the night; and let them be for signs, 
and for seasons, and for days, and years: 
And let them be for lights in the firmament 
of the heaven to give light upon the earth: 
arid it was so. And God made two great 
lights; the greater light to rule the day, and 
the lesser light to rule the night : he made the 
stars also. And God set them in the firma- 
ment of the heaven to give light upon the 
earth, and to rule over the day and over the 
night, and to divide the light from the dark- 
ness: and God saw that it was good. And 
the evening and the morning were the fourth 
day. 

And God said, Let the waters bring forth 
abundantly the moving creature that hath 
life, and fowl that may fly above the earth 
in the open firmament of heaven. And God 
created great whales, and every living crea- 
ture that moveth, which the waters brought 
forth abundantly, after their kind, and every 
winged fowl after his kind: and God saw 
that it was good. And God blessed them, 
saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the 
waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in 
the earth. And the evening and the morning 
were the fifth day. 

And God said, Let the earth bring forth 
the living creature after his kind, cattle, and 
creeping thing, and beast of the earth after 



GENESIS 37 

his kind : and it was so. And God made the 
beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle 
after their kind, and every thing that creep- 
eth upon the earth after his kind: and God 
saw that it was good. And God said, Let us 
make man in our image, after our likeness: 
and let them have dominion over the fish of 
the sea^ and over the fowl of \he airland oVer 
the cattle, and over all the earth, and over 
every creeping thing that creepeth upon the 
earth. So God created man in his own image, 
in the image of God created he him; male 
and female created he them. And God 
blessed them, and God said unto them, Be 
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the 
earth, and subdue it : and have dominion over 
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the 
air, and over every living thing that moveth 
upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I 
have given you every herb bearing seed, 
which is upon the face of all the earth, and 
every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree 
yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 
And to every beast of the earth, and to every 
fowl of the air, and to every thing that 
creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is 
life, I have given every green herb for meat : 
and it was so. And God saw every thing 
that he had made, and, behold, it was very 
good. And the evening and the morning 
were the sixth day. 



38 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

This chapter abolished mythology 
throughout the civilized world. There were 
doubtless mythological germs among the 
Hebrews themselves but this chapter steril- 
ized them. Latin, Greek, Norse, and Ori- 
ental mythology lived on for a while but the 
warrant of dispossession had been served 
and gods and goddesses, demigods and demi- 
goddesses, naiads, dryads, and hamadryads, 
all had to go. Some of them found refuge 
in poetry and romance; some in the orna- 
ment and compliment of oratory; some in 
the metaphors and similes of rhetoric. But 
in exact proportion as the first great thought 
of the Bible had free circulation among races 
and nations, the big gods and the little gods 
were doomed. Mythology became a mere 
toy of the mind. The preface to the Bible 
had throned one God as maker and pre- 
server of all. It served as a sort of cosmic 
Monroe Doctrine, announcing to the old 
deities that any attempt on their part to 
extend their system to any portion of the 
universe would henceforth be considered 
dangerous to the well-being of mankind. It 
had its effect. The dignity and authorita- 
tiveness of the announcement, the splendor 
of the vision that it unfolded, and the instant 
appeal made to what we now call intuitional 






GENESIS 39 

probability marked the inauguration of a 
new era in human thought. 

There is in fact nothing finer in the Old 
Testament than the way in which the author 
of the first chapter of Genesis takes the ele- 
mental timbers of the world and cleans them 
of all the incrustations that had gathered 
upon them. Earth, water, night, sun, moon, 
stars, — read what Greek and Roman in- 
tellects had done with these, how buried 
they were beneath the sediment of bizarre 
fancy and grotesque history. There is not 
a verse of this chapter that does not by its 
mere omissions register an altitude of spirit 
immeasurably beyond all that had gone be- 
fore. Matthew Arnold has drawn an elabo- 
rate distinction between the Hebrew genius 
or Hebraism and the Greek genius or 
Hellenism. " The uppermost idea with 
Hellenism, " he says, 1 " is to see things as 
they really are; the uppermost idea with 
Hebraism is conduct and obedience." The 
distinction has enough truth to float it but 
it does not fit the first chapter of Genesis. 

Read the great chapter once more and 
weigh its findings against this summary of 
classical mythology by John Fiske : 2 " To 

1 " Culture and Anarchy," chapter IV. 
8 " Myths and Myth-Makers," p. 18. 



40 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

the ancients, the moon was not a lifeless 
body of stones and clods ; it was the horned 
huntress Artemis, coursing through the 
upper ether, or bathing herself in the clear 
lake; or it was Aphrodite, protectress of 
lovers, born of the sea-foam in the East, 
near Cyprus. The clouds were not bodies 
of vaporized water; they were cows, with 
swelling udders, driven to the milking by 
Hermes, the summer wind; or great sheep 
with moist fleeces, slain by the unerring 
arrows of Bellerophon, the sun; or swan- 
maidens, flitting across the firmament; 
Valkyries hovering over the battle-field, to 
receive the souls of falling heroes; or, again, 
they were mighty mountains, piled one 
above another, in whose cavernous recesses 
the divining-wand of the storm-god Thor 
revealed hidden treasures. The yellow- 
haired sun Phoebus drove westerly all day 
in his flaming chariot; or, perhaps, as 
Meleager, retired for a while in disgust from 
the sight of men; wedded at eventide the 
violet light (CEnone, Iole) which he had 
forsaken in the morning; sank as Hercules 
upon a blazing funeral-pyre, or, like Aga- 
memnon, perished in a blood-stained bath; 
or, as the fish-god, Dagon, swam nightly 
through the subterranean waters to appear 



GENESIS 41 

eastward again at daybreak. Sometimes 
Phaethon, his rash, inexperienced son, would 
take the reins and drive the solar chariot 
too near the earth, causing the fruits to 
perish, and the grass to wither, and the wells 
to dry up." 

Is not the passion for seeing things as 
they really are more deeply wrought into 
the first chapter of Genesis than into the 
Greek conception? There is no doubt that 
conduct and obedience were central and con- 
trolling in Hebrew thought but they were 
not isolated from things as they are. They 
were built on them; they were supported 
and vitalized by them ; they were a part of 
a natural and necessary interdependence 
that the Hebrew felt far more vividly than 
the Greek. When Boeckh, perhaps the 
greatest of Hellenists, came to sum up the 
defects of the Greek genius, he used this 
language : " While the Greeks saw each par- 
ticular thing in its concrete shape, and in 
all their work strove for supreme excellence, 
the vision of all things in a universal inter- 
dependence was denied them. ,, But the 
central achievement of the first chapter of 
Genesis is just this " vision of all things in a » 
universal interdependence." 

The poets have sometimes attributed the 



42 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

passing of mythology to the revelations of 
science. In his Sonnet to Science, Poe asks : 

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car ? 
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood 
To seek a shelter in some happier star ? 
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, 
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me 
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree ? 

It was not modern science, however, that 
sent mythology to the discard. It was the 
first chapter of Genesis. Mythology did not 
live long enough to give modern science a 
chance to get at it. And the death of myth- 
ology, so far from injuring nature poetry, 
helped it. These countless myths of crea- 
tion not only kept men from a knowledge of 
nature but made a genuine love of nature 
impossible. They substituted for the laws 
and charms of nature the capricious doings 
of gods and goddesses. Lanier * sums up ad- 
mirably the real reason why mythology 
checked and postponed the spread of nature 
poetry : 

Much time is run, and man hath changed his 

ways, 
Since Nature, in the antique fable-days, 
Was hid from man's true love by proxy fays, 

1 " The Symphony." 



GENESIS 43 

False fauns and rascal gods that stole her 

praise. 
The nymphs, cold creatures of man's colder 

brain, 
Chilled Nature's streams till man's warm 

heart was fain 
Never to lave its love in them again. 1 

But the greatest achievement of the first 
chapter of Genesis is that it announced unity, 
order, and progression in nature. Compare 
this chapter with any preceding account of 
the creation of the world and it will be found 
unique not only in dispossessing gods and 
goddesses of their former holdings but in 
staging the hitherto unrecognized qualities 
of unity, order, and progression. The claim 
is sometimes made that other and older ac- 
counts of creation have been exhumed that 
anticipate many of the details of the Hebrew 
record. If this were true it would not in- 
validate our thesis, for the Hebrew account 
antiquated at one stroke all preceding ac- 
counts and became alone the torch-bearer of 
the new view. But the claim made for other 
accounts is not true. Of course many of 

1 Compare also Chateaubriand's fine saying in 
" Le Genie du Christianisme ": "Libres de ce trou- 
peau de dieux ridicules qui les bornaient de toutes 
parts, les bois se sont remplis d'une divinite im- 
mense." 



44 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

the created things mentioned in Genesis may 
be found in other accounts, but there is no 
unity, no order, no progression. 

Take the famous Hymn to Creation from 
The Veda. 1 It ends : 

How and from what has sprung this Uni- 
verse? The gods 

Themselves are subsequent to its development. 

Who, then, can penetrate the secret of its 
rise? 

Whether 'twas framed or not, made or not 
made, he only 

Who in the highest sits, the omniscient Lord, 

Assuredly knows all, or haply knows he not. 

This is no account of creation. It is only a 
dignified way of saying, " I know nothing 
about it and doubt if God Himself knows." 
Compare The Sumero-Babylonian Account of 
the Creation of the World by Mardnk. 2 The 
order (or disorder) of creation in this inter- 
esting fragment is (1) lands and cities, 
(2) spirits of the earth, (3) mankind, (4) ani- 
mals and the great rivers, (5) vegetation and 
more animals, (6) beginnings of city civiliza- 
tion. Whether written before or after Gene- 

1 See " Old Sanskrit Texts," by J. Muir, p. 22. 

2 See " Beginnings of Hebrew History," Appendix 
III, by Charles Foster Kent. 



GENESIS 45 

sis the Sumero-Babylonian narrative can 
serve only as a foil to the Hebrew account. 
The other Babylonian accounts tell of the 
long war between Marduk and Tiamat or 
between Bel and Thamte. There are big 
gods, little gods, middle-sized gods, mon- 
sters, vipers, dragons, raging hounds, scor- 
pion men, fish men, everything but unity and 
system. There are contrasts, startling con- 
trasts, to Genesis in these fantastic accounts 
but, in the strict sense of the word, no 
parallels. When we remember that the 
Babylonian civilization was the elder, that it 
environed the Hebrews from the very be- 
ginning of their national career, and that it 
soon became a part of the cult of the Pheni- 
cians and Canaanites, we begin to realize 
what an epoch in religious thought the first 
chapter of Genesis marks. 

It is to my mind one of the strangest 
ironies of history that this chapter should 
be singled out as distinctively unscientific. 
It is the one chapter in the Bible that made 
science possible. It is the magna charta of 
science. There was no science and there 
could be no science until men recognized 
that unity, order, and progression are in- 
herent in nature's processes. How were 
men brought to this recognition? Two 



46 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

routes were possible. (1) They could ac- 
cept the unity, order, and progression of 
Genesis and on this pre-supposition proceed 
to verification; (2) without knowledge of or 
belief in Genesis they could experiment in- 
dependently and thus arrive by induction at 
a knowledge of the orderliness or potential 
science inherent in nature. Now the his- 
tory of science proves unmistakably that the 
first method was that actually followed. 
The founders of modern science, those on 
whom the great nineteenth century scientists 
built, were Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, 
and Newton. These men believed that 
there was " mind/' " thought," "Almighty 
power," " design," " intelligence," " an in- 
telligent Agent " in nature. They believed 
it not because they had proved it: proof 
came later. They believed it because Gene- 
sis affirmed it. 

" I had rather believe," wrote Bacon, " all 
the legends in the Talmud and the Alcoran 
than that this universal frame is without a 
mind." Kepler said : " In reading the se- \ 
crets of Nature I am thinking the thoughts 
of God after Him." Kepler was moved to 
his discoveries, says Benjamin Pierce, 1 " by H 
an exalted faith, anterior and superior to all j 

1M Ideality in the Physical Sciences." 



GENESIS 47 

science, in the existence of intimate relations 
between the constitution of man's mind and 
that of God's firmament." Galileo believed 
that his own discoveries would be recog- 
nized not only as in harmony with Genesis 
but " as the most transcendent displays of 
Almighty power." Harvey told Robert 
Boyle that he was led to discover the cir- 
culation of the blood by observing that, in 
the channels through which the blood flows, 
one set of valves opens toward the heart 
while another set opens in the opposite 
direction, and that he could not help believ- 
ing that " so prudent a cause as nature had 
not placed so many valves without a de- 
sign." Newton, in his first letter to Bent- 
ley, declares that when he wrote the third 
book of his Principia he " had an eye upon 
such principles as might work, with con- 
sidering men, for the belief of a Deity " and 
he expresses his happiness that it has been 
found useful for that purpose. In his second 
letter to Bentley (January 17, 1692-3) he 
writes : " I am compelled to ascribe the 
frame of this system to an intelligent 
Agent." 

When Huxley says, therefore, that 
u Science is the discovery of the rational 
order that pervades the universe," he states 



48 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

clearly what might have been, what perhaps 
would have been. In historic fact, how- 
ever, the founders of science being them- 
selves the judges, " the rational order that 
pervades the universe " was not discovered. 
It was revealed. The discoveries of science 
made between the years 1600 and 1700 — and 
these laid the foundations for all later sci- 
ence — are, in their last analysis, only veri- 
fications, combinations, illustrations, or, 
better still, acceptations, of the rational 
order proclaimed for the first time in the 
first chapter of Genesis. 

II 

Perhaps we have dwelt too long upon a 
single chapter but this chapter constitutes 
one of the two divisions into which the book 
of Genesis naturally falls. These divisions 
we may call Creation and Probation. 
There is no overlapping. The first chapter 
is concerned wholly with creation, while the 
remaining forty-nine chapters develop the 
idea of probation. In the first chapter the 
stage is built; in the second chapter the 
drama begins. The first chapter presents 
man neither as moral nor as immoral. He 
is merely one of the animals created. Only 
one command was laid upon him and it had 



GENESIS 49 

reference solely to his physical nature. 
Conscience was neither invoked nor in- 
volved. But in the second chapter God 
lays upon man an ethical responsibility. 
Man is not merely the supreme triumph of 
physical creation. He is a moral being. 
He can distinguish between good and evil. 
He is on probation, and he knows it. Now 
begins his effort to get in tune with the in- 
finite, to establish an entente cordiale with his 
Maker. There is not a suggestion of this 
struggle or even of man's capacity for such 
a struggle in the first chapter. It begins in 
the second. It ends with the last chapter 
of Revelation. 

But every commentator on Genesis, so far 
as my reading goes, divides the book, it is 
true, into two divisions, but these divisions 
run respectively from the beginning to the 
call of Abraham and from the call of 
Abraham to the close. The first division is 
called, with many subdivisions, the Begin- 
nings of Human History; the second is 
called the Traditional Ancestors of the 
Hebrews. But the distinctions overlap and 
are confusing. Neither is central or or- 
ganic. To call the first ten or eleven chap- 
ters of Genesis the Beginnings of Human 
History is to omit entirely the evenings and 



50 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

mornings of the first five days. It is to 
ignore entirely the unity, order, and progres- 
sion that make the first chapter of Genesis 
incomparable in the world's literature. But, 
if one is going to make this omission, why 
not call the whole of Genesis the Beginnings 
of Human History? Was it less human 
when Abraham appeared? Or, with the 
same omission, why not say that the whole 
of Genesis is devoted to the Traditional 
Ancestors of the Hebrews? Adam and 
Eve, though as yet unnamed, appear in the 
first chapter and they were traditional an- 
cestors of the Hebrews. 

That there are only two divisions in Gene- 
sis and that these divisions include re- 
spectively the first chapter and the remain- 
ing forty-nine was certainly the belief of the 
jwriter of the book of Hebrews, In fact Gene- 
\sis is the only book of the Old Testament 
that is analyzed and interpreted as a book 
unit by a writer in the New Testament. In 
Hebrews 11: 3 we read: " Through faith we 
understand that the worlds were framed by 
the word of God, so that things which are 
seen were not made of things which do ap- 
pear." Is not that a perfect interpretation 
of the first chapter of Genesis? Then follows 
the honor roll of those whose probation is- 



GENESIS 51 

sued victoriously in an unclouded faith. They 
are Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sara, Isaac, 
Jacob, and Joseph. "These all died in faith, 
not having received the promises, but hav- 
ing seen them afar off, and were persuaded 
of them, and embraced them, and confessed 
that they were strangers and pilgrims on the 
earth" (Hebrews 11:13). Is not that a 
perfect interpretation of the second division 
of Genesis ? Had the author been making a 
summary instead of an interpretation he 
would have enumerated the six creative acts 
in the first chapter of Genesis and he would 
have mentioned Adam and Eve as examples 
of those in whom probation wrought dis- 
aster. He was dealing with principles, how- 
ever, not details. But that he does not find 
in the character or career of Abraham any- 
thing elementally pivotal is noteworthy. It 
at least differentiates the author of Hebrews 
from other commentators on Genesis. Abra- 
ham undoubtedly weighed more than any 
one else in the list but the scales used were 
the same for all. His influence was greater 
but the source of his strength was the source 
from which all drew. His faith differed in 
degree but not in kind from the faith of 
those who went before and those who came 
immediately after him. His reaction to pro- 



52 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

bation was distinctively noble but it was not 
distinctively different from the reaction of 
others on the honor roll. 

May we not say that, if the first chapter of 
Genesis marks an epoch in its attitude to the 
nature about us, the remaining chapters 
register a still more significant advance in 
their attitude to the nature within us? 
What a group is here assembled! There 
are no warriors, no poets, no scholars, no 
demigods, no kings or queens, no men or 
women famed merely for their looks or 
physical prowess. Nobody is distinguished 
merely by wealth or social position. They 
are just ordinary men and women trying 
to lift their eyes level to God's command. 
But they were the world's most beneficent 
pioneers. We say now confidently that "A 
man's reach should exceed his grasp, " that 
" One on God's side is a majority," that 
" Right makes might," that 

Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 
'Tis only noble to be good, 

that 

I go to prove my soul! 
I see my way as birds their trackless way. 
I shall arrive ! what time, what circuit first, 
I ask not : but unless God send his hail 



GENESIS 53 

Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, 
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive : 
He guides me and the bird. In his good time ! 

These and a thousand other beacon thoughts 
are commonplaces to-day. Civilization and 
progress are built upon them. But the 
heroes of Genesis were the first to leave their 
footprints on the stretches of that lone way. 
They were not philosophers: philosophy is 
the theatre of the analytic intellect, not the 
drama of man. Life was not a theory with 
them. It was a faith, a conviction, a dedica- 
tion. Their pathway is now become a 
highway, but the highway, though broader 
and less obstructed, still points the way that 
was first pointed by the pathway. They 
stumbled many a time, and fell. There were 
no perfect men among them, but they knew 
their own failings, knew them because of 
the very vividness with which they had 
glimpsed the unchanging ideal. If science 
got its start in the first chapter of Genesis, 
man's spiritual history harks back as surely 
to the remaining chapters. If there are no 
parallels in earlier records to the majestic 
story of Creation, I need hardly remind you 
that there is nothing approaching the spiri- 
tualizing of Probation to which the major 
part of Genesis is devoted. 



54 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

The reader will miss much of the charm 
and challenge of Genesis if he fails to note 
how clearly the leading characters in our 
group are differentiated. Each is a type but 
none the less an individual. Each reacted 
to probation differently but characteristic- 
ally. There was no surrender of person- 
ality. If thrown into their company I be- 
lieve I could identify most of them, provided 
they talked freely and in propria persona. It 
is interesting to observe that the role that 
each was to play in the thought of the 
world could not be determined till the com- 
ing of Christ. The light of the Cross 
streamed backward as well as forward, and 
in that light much that was only translucent 
in the Old Testament became transparent 
in the New. Adam, for example, is hardly 
more than mentioned in the Old Testament 
outside of Genesis. But in the New Testa- 
ment he is interpreted. He becomes a point 
de repere, a contrasting type of Christ. The 
most luminous sentence about him was that 
of Paul : " For as in Adam all die, even so 
in Christ shall all be made alive." Adam 
was neither hero nor villain but only a half- 
man. Lacking a childhood and youth he 
lacked also the directive and steadying in- 

*1 Corinthians 15:22. 



GENESIS 55 

fluences that come from normally slow de- 
velopment. He and Cain reacted to proba- 
tion in a way that proved the rule of faith 
through disobedience to the rule. They 
spoke a dialect that proclaimed by contrast 
the existence of a standard speech. Abel 
has been called a " a type of the countless 
good people who are creatively good for 
nothing, the respectable negatives who 
might as well never have been born." But 
this is more Shavian than Biblical. Abel is 
rather the symbol of right overthrown by 
might but still appealing. It is at least 
worth noting that the first collection of 
biographical sketches published in the Eng- 
lish language was Thomas Fuller's Abel 
Redevivus: or the Dead yet Speaking. It is said 
of both Enoch and Noah that they " walked 
with God." But Noah was evidently more 
of a chance companion than a steady com- 
rade of the Almighty's. Though many 
pages are given to him he does not live more 
securely in his four chapters than Enoch in 
his one verse: "And Enoch walked with 
God: and he was not; for God took him." 
Is there in human speech a more beautiful 
or satisfying biography? 

2 See "The Bible's Prose Epic of Eve and her 
Sons," by Eric S. Robertson. 



56 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

But Abraham looms larger than any of 
them. There was more driving force in 
him than in Isaac, less habitual subtlety than 
in Jacob, but also less lovableness than in 
Joseph. Note the moral energy released 
in him through the conviction that in him 
his descendants would be blessed. Neither 
Isaac, nor Jacob, nor Joseph seems to have 
felt as acutely or as resiliently the repre- 
sentative responsibility thus imposed. Abra- 
ham became the present consciously condi- 
tioning the future. Countless thousands 
were to be made or marred by his loyalty or 
disloyalty. He is modern society, for science 
now joins hands with religion in making 
one's descendants chant forever in one's 
ears: " Be good for our sake." Others had 
believed in one God before Abraham, and 
others had gone forth as leaders and builders 
of nations yet to be. But it is certain that 
from Abraham the monotheistic belief has 
been diffused and diffused unbrokenly. It 
is certain, too, that never before had a 
pioneer gone forth to build a nation with 
faith in God as its foundation and super- 
structure. Whenever to-day a great reform 
is inaugurated not by power nor by might 
but by a single soul in league with God, the 
journey from Haran begins again. The real 



GENESIS -57 

wandering Jew is not Kartaphilos or Ahas- 
uerus, wretched souls on whom the Master 
was said to have pronounced a curse. It is 
Abraham, the greatest of all pioneer ideal- 
ists. He wanders not because he has been 
cursed but because he has been blessed. He 
does not seek to escape from his past but to 
follow the beckonings of his future. His 
reappearances are not in remote and deso- 
late places but where the eyes of men 
glimpse a height beyond the farthest height 
and a glory beyond the utmost glory. "For 
he looked for a city which hath foundations, 
whose builder and maker is God." 

As we study the individual reactions of 
these pioneers the conviction comes with 
new force that Hebrew monotheism was a 
message to the individual, not to the de- 
individualized group. Modern criticism in 
its insistence on Hebrew collectivism or na- 
tional solidarity has strangely perverted this 
truth. In the pages of much Old Testament 
criticism of to-day God seems to be little 
more than the director of a privileged cor- 
poration; there is no direct relationship be- 
tween Him and the individual Hebrew; it 
is the people as a distinct but collective unit 
that He addresses. There is not a book in 
the Old Testament which, if read as a whole, 



58 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

will not contradict authoritatively the ex- 
cessive and impersonal nationalism which 
many commentators seem determined to 
read into special passages and separate in- 
cidents. The ritualism of the Old Testa- 
ment is, of course, collective; but the re- 
ligion is individual. Thou and thee far out- 
number ye and you. There is not a ye or you 
in the ten commandments; and even when 
the plural pronoun occurs in Leviticus or 
Deuteronomy, or when the word people or na- 
tion is employed, thou and thee usually follow 
at once, so that the initial mass-appeal is 
broken up and focussed directly and sepa- 
rately upon the individual. Monotheism 
did, it is true, develop an elaborate ritual 
which at times threatened if it did not 
throttle personal responsibility. But in 
Genesis there is hardly a hint of ritualism. 
Religion is personal. It is an umbrella, not 
a roof. Back to Genesis, then, means not 
only back to individualism but back to the 
saving essence that religion had in its be- 
ginning, an essence that the prophets vindi- 
cated from generation to generation and 
that the New Testament at last triumphantly 
restored. 

Ill 
By way of summary, did you ever think 



GENESIS 59 

of Kant's great saying as an undesigned 
tribute to Genesis? " Two things," he said 
at the close of his Critique of Practical Reason, 
" fill the mind with ever new and increasing 
admiration and awe, the oftener and the 
more steadily we reflect upon them : the 
starry heavens above and the moral law 
within." These were Kant's two admira- 
tions, his two reverences, his two infinities, 
as they are of every man who thinks reso- 
lutely about them. Necessity is the law of 
the first, said Kant, liberty of the second. 
Is it not remarkable that the first book of 
the Bible faces precisely the two mysteries 
that moved the awe of the great philosopher, 
Creation and Probation? The last word of 
human philosophy is thus the first word of 
the Bible. The two twin summits that have 
challenged the climbers of all ages are the 
starting-places of Genesis. But there is a 
difference. To the modern philosopher 
there were mists upon the summits; to the 
author of Genesis there was sunlight. Two 
infinities but one faith ! The synthesis is in 
the first words of Genesis: " In the beginning, 
God." 



Ill 

ESTHER 

i 

ESTHER has always seemed to me the 
best told story in the Bible. Who- 
ever wrote it was a master in the art 
of omitting non-essentials and of concentrat- 
ing attention upon what really counted. He 
knew how to grip his reader's attention at 
the start, how to mass or distribute his de- 
tails in harmony with his main design, and 
how to make each part of the narrative con- 
tribute its quota to the larger or superin- 
tending purpose. I do not forget the story 
of Joseph, the idyllic charm of Ruth, or the 
fragments of vivid epics found in Judges. 
But Esther, more than any of these, seems to 
me a sort of anticipation of an art that is 
to-day considered almost distinctively Amer- 
ican, — I mean the art of the modern short 
story. The constitution of this latest of 
literary genres was drawn up by Poe when he 
wrote, in 1842, that the goal of the writer 
should not be background, plot, or character 

60 



ESTHER 61 

but the interweaving of these to produce a 

definite and preconceived effect. " If his 
very initial sentence," says Poe, " tend not 
to the outbringing of this effect, then he 
has failed in his first step. In the whole 
composition there should be no word written 
of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is 
not to the one preestablished design." 

Not only does Esther meet this require- 
ment of the modern short story but it sur- 
passes all short stories, ancient and modern, 
in its annually recurrent service. A few days 
ago I clipped the following announcement 
from a New York daily paper : 

The celebration of the feast of Purim will 
commence this evening and will continue for 
twenty- four hours. This is a festival of the 
Jews celebrated on the fourteenth day of the 
month of Adar and was ordained to com- 
memorate the deliverance of the Jews from 
national destruction by the Persians, as nar- 
rated in the Book of Esther. The festival 
of Purim is now a day of rejoicing, of ex- 
changing of gifts among friends and giving 
liberally to the poor. Its observance in the 
synagogue is limited to the reading of the 
Book of Esther, but in the homes of the 
orthodox Jews the celebration is marked by 
social parties, masquerades, and other enter- 
tainments. 



62 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

Thus for more than two thousand years 
Esther has been read aloud once a year in all 
Jewish synagogues. The name of Haman 
is still greeted with jeers, the name of Esther 
with cheers. It is interesting to remember 
that Christ Himself in early boyhood must 
have joined in the acclaim rendered to 
Esther at this festival, and, if He ever jeered 
at any one, He jeered at the name of the 
monster who sought her life and the life of 
her people. Just as Dickens's Christmas 
Carol revived and renationalized the waning 
celebration of Christmas in England, so the 
book of Esther revived and renationalized 
the receding festival of Purim. Just as the 
annual reading of our Declaration of Inde- 
pendence recalls and rededicates to a wider 
service our heroic past, so the annual read- 
ing of Esther has made of a Jewish past 
a continuous and continuing present. We 
are not surprised when history tells us 
of some great state paper, or national epic, 
or patriotic song that has served for cen- 
turies to band together a people. But for a 
short story this is a new office. Esther, then, 
is unique not only in its modern structure 
but in its history and age-long service. 



ESTHER 63 

II 

One of the distinctive excellencies of the 
story lies in the handling of the background 
and in making it subserve the underlying 
purpose of the narrative. You remember 
that Shakespeare begins Macbeth with the 
appearance of the witches who chant 

Fair is foul and foul is fair. 

This is one of the great keynote scenes in 
modern literature. Fair things were in fact 
to prove foul, and foul things fair; friends 
were to appear as enemies and enemies were 
to be disguised as friends. The entire play 
pivots around this chant of the witches. 
With equal art Esther begins with Persian 
bigness that was not greatness and pits con- 
sistently against it Jewish greatness that j 
was not bigness. The Persian king ruled 1 
over one hundred and twenty-seven prov- 
inces; the Persian banquet lasted one hun- 
dred and eighty days and was topped off by 
a luncheon of seven days; the gallows pre- 
pared for Mordecai was eighty-three feet 
high; the money to be wrested from the 
Jews was eighteen million dollars. Against 
this background we see only a captive Jew- 
ish orphan, named Esther, and her cousin, 



64 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

named Mordecai. " Little is big and big 
is little " is the unsung refrain that binds 
together the diverse incidents of the story 
as the witches' words bind together the 
diverse incidents of Shakespeare's play. 

Another element of the background that 
intensifies the patriotic appeal is the foreign 
locale. The plot takes place not in Jewish 
Jerusalem but in Persian and pagan Shu- 
shan. Joseph in Egypt, Livingstone in Cen- 
tral Africa, Chinese Gordon in Nubia, 
Franklin in Paris, Dewey in Manila, Gerard 
in Berlin stir our patriotism far more than 
if the same courage or loyalty had been 
shown at home. The thought of Esther in 
the far-away land, under alien skies and 
alien institutions, denied the reassurance of 
home faces and neighbor ways, beyond the 
beckoning of the hills and streams that she 
knew so well, this sends a challenge to our 
interest and admiration impossible in the 
case of a Judean locale. 

Ill 
The plot may be skeletonized as follows: 

I. Vashti dethroned. Enter Queen 

Esther (1:1-2:20). 
II. Haman vs. Mordecai. Haman vic- 
torious (2:21-3:15). 



ESTHEE 65 

III. " Who knoweth whether thou art 

come to the kingdom for such a 
time as this?" (4:1-5:8). 

IV. Between banquets (5:9-6:14). 
V. The second banquet (7 : 1-7 : 9). 

VI. Victory (7:10-9:19). 
VII. The Feast of Purim (9 : 20-9 : 32). 
VIII. See for fuller details "The Chron- 
icles of the Kings of Media and 
Persia" (10:1-10:3). 

The incidents move in a leisurely way 
until Esther proposes a second banquet 
(5:8). I do not know why she deferred 
her petition from the first banquet to the 
second, but I do know that the period " Be- 
tween banquets (5:9-6:14)" is a bit of 
narrative handling unsurpassed even in the 
Bible. It stamps the author as one of the 
great narrative artists. It marks the emer- 
gence in Hebrew literature of a technique 
that the critics had considered non-existent 
till the advent of Poe, DeMaupassant, Kip- 
ling, and O. Henry. The mere facts told in 
the interim between the two banquets are 
negligible as facts. If you are reading for 
facts alone, for bald objective happenings, 
you may omit this section entirely. The 
verse that precedes the section and the verse 
that follows it seem themselves unaware of 
what lies between. Note how they blend 



66 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

into each other : " If I have found favor in 
the sight of the king, and if it please the 
king to grant my petition and to perform 
my request, let the king and Haman come 
to the banquet that I shall prepare for them, 
and I will do to-morrow as the king hath 
said. . . • So the king and Haman came 
to banquet with Esther the queen." But 
between those two verses there are inter- 
posed twenty verses which, more than any 
other twenty verses in the story, lift the 
plot out of the category of routine chronicle 
and give it a secure place among the master- 
pieces of narrative literature. 

These twenty verses seem commissioned 
by the author to shadow Haman from ban- 
quet to banquet. " Trail him," the order 
would seem, " and report his words, his 
deeds, his thoughts. He has hitherto been 
a mere symbol, an impersonal embodiment 
of cruelty and sycophancy. Show him to 
us not on dress parade but at home with 
wife and friends. The other characters in 
the story have personality. Invest him with 
it, too. Let him not only point a moral but 
stand for all time as a deterrent type of 
actual flesh and blood." The detective 
verses play their part well. Let us follow 
them : 



ESTHEE 67 

Haman hurries home from the first ban- 
quet, calls for his wife and friends, tells 
them exultingly of the honor shown him, and 
hints still greater honor at the banquet set 
for to-morrow. " Yet all this availeth me 
nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew 
sitting at the king's gate." His wife and 
friends suggest that a gallows be erected at 
once for Mordecai and that at the forthcom- 
ing banquet the king's consent be secured for 
an immediate execution. The gallows is 
erected during the night but " On that night 
could not the king sleep." There is some- 
thing ominous in the tread of the little mono- 
syllables. The king's insomnia marks in fact 
a crisis in the story ; but, before the tragedy 
falls, there intervenes the most humorous 
scene in the Bible. Like the knocking at the 
gate in Macbeth it is a buffer scene thrust 
between the tenseness that precedes and the 
heightened tenseness that is to follow. 
Haman arrives and learns that the king has 
just asked for him. His majesty's much 
banqueting, it seems, had dulled his memory 
of current events. So, while he lies tossing 
and while not a parasang away the finishing 
touches are being put on the gallows, he asks 
that some one read to him the record of 
recent happenings. Learning that one named 
Mordecai had saved his majesty's life a few 
days before but had gone unrewarded, the 



68 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

king wakes to a sense of obligation rightly 
incurred but strangely overlooked. " Who is 
in the court ? " he asks. " Hainan." Haman, 
knowing nothing of the reading, was at that 
very moment conning his petition about 
Mordecai and the gallows. As he enters 
and salutes, the king asks yawningly : " What 
shall be done unto the man whom the king 
delighteth to honor ? " Haman had his an- 
swer pat. The very elaborateness of it 
shows that the question had long been antici- 
pated and that the answer had probably been 
formulated after a conference with his wife 
and friends : " Let the royal apparel be 
brought which the king useth to wear, and 
the horse that the king rideth upon, and the 
crown royal which is set upon his head. 
And let this apparel and horse be delivered 
to the hand of one of the king's most noble 
princes, that they may array the man withal 
whom the king delighteth to honor, and bring 
him on horseback through the street of the 
city, and proclaim before him, Thus shall it 
be done to the man whom the king delight- 
eth to honor/* Was there ever a better auto- 
biography in miniature ? 

Did the king smile as he answered, " Do 
even so to Mordecai the Jew " ? I think not. 
But I know that Jewish men and women and 
boys and girls, peeping timidly from half 
opened doors, smiled at that strange proces- 



ESTHEE 69 

sion as they had never smiled before. And 
every year the procession is renewed at the 
Feast of Purim. Down through the cen- 
turies pedestrian Haman still solemnly stalks 
leading the horse for equestrian Mordecai; 
and the smiles break into laughter, for faith 
is rekindled and old memories are stirred and 
patriotism flames anew upon its oldest and 
most sacred altars. Through what streets of 
Shushan the procession wound we are not 
told. Not many Jewish homes, I think, were 
omitted; but the street that led by Hainan' s 
home was not on the route. His wife and 
friends knew nothing of it all till he " hasted 
to his house mourning and having his head 
covered" and told them what had befallen 
him. He had but a moment to stay, for the 
hour of the second banquet had come. His 
wife and friends found time, however, to tell 
him as he passed out of the door, " If Mor- 
decai be of the seed of the Jews, before 
whom thou hast begun to fall, thou shalt not 
prevail against him, but shalt surely fall be- 
fore him." There was no time to answer, 
for " while they were yet talking with him, 
came the king's chamberlains and hasted to 
bring Haman unto the banquet that Esther 
had prepared." 

Our twenty verses flow back now into the 
central current. Their metier has been to 



70 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

reveal the kind of man that Haman really 
and inwardly was. When he swings at 
nightfall from the gallows that he had 
erected for Mordecai, our moral sense is 
satisfied because our detective verses have 
made the record clear against him, have 
brought into sharp relief his essential and 
ineradicable wolfishness, and thus rendered 
his execution a necessity in the forward 
march of mercy and righteousness. 

IV 
But the characters are to me more in- 
teresting than the plot. The author of the 
story had not only an unerring feeling for 
background and incident but an equally sure 
eye for character traits. Each character is 
portrayed from within. A few deft strokes 
and the controlling motives stand clearly 
limned. In no other book of the Bible is 
there a more effective use of conversation, 
the direct words being given wherever 
vividness is desired. Ahasuerus, Memucan, 
Haman, Mordecai, and Esther all speak in 
the first person and all speak self-reveal- 
ingly. This use of direct discourse is pecul- 
iarly a mark of the modern short story and 
is thus another link binding the technique of 
Esther to our own times. To feel the 



ESTHER 71 

superiority of the direct form of statement 
here employed, recast some of the conversa- 
tions and note the loss in force and appeal. 
Instead of " Who knoweth whether thou art 
come to the kingdom for such a time as 
this?" suppose the form had been: " Mor- 
decai asked Esther if she was acquainted 
with any one who knew whether she was 
come to the kingdom for such a time as 
this." The skeleton remains, but the life 
has gone. 

As in Genesis, so in Esther, each character 
is a type but also an individual. The two 
terms are often confused. The writer of 
Esther, like Shakespeare, probably had no 
conscious thought of the distinction here 
made between the individual and the type; 
but both wrote from life and in life the dis- 
tinction is writ large upon every page. An 
individual character, whether in life or 
literature, is a character that is sharply dif- 
ferentiated from all other characters. The 
differential may be physical or mental or 
moral, an excellence or a defect, an asset or 
a liability. Typical characters, on the con- 
trary, embody some well-known virtue or 
vice, some commonplace of philosophy, 
some widely diffused principle of thought or 
action, some everyday epidemic of behavior, 



72 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

and embody it so exclusively that the per- 
son yields to the trait. The individual 
character stands for one, the type character 
for many. The individual character is 
singular in form and function; the type 
character is singular in form, but like our 
collective nouns, crowd, congregation, army, 
navy, plural in function. It is easy to see 
and say that a character is individual but we 
cannot pronounce a character typical until 
our circuit of knowledge enables us to 
classify him. The use of the term typical, 
therefore, is measured wholly by the range 
and variety of characters, real or fictive, 
that we know. All characters are individual 
to children but increasingly typical to their 
parents. It is the type qualities that the 
Bible writers chiefly stress and it is these in 
Esther that I shall touch upon during the 
remainder of the hour. 

Ahasuerus is a tank that runs blood or 
wine according to the hand that turns the 
spigot. Though he was the source of all 
executive power in the story he himself 
originates nothing. The dethronement of 
Vashti, the method of selecting her suc- 
cessor, the proposed destruction of the 
Jews, the counter decree, the honor to Mor- 
decai, the execution of Haman, not one of 



ESTHER 73 

these was proposed by the king. He only 
adopted them. Read the record again and 
observe how accurately the author has 
caught the note of majestic inertia that 
characterizes the Oriental monarch. Among 
the leading characters of the story he alone 
is stationary, all the others passing from 
high to low or low to high as the story ad- 
vances. He remains at the end the same 
vast and vacant stretch of immobility that 
he was at the beginning. He, by the way, 
is our old friend Xerxes, who, according to 
Herodotus, ordered three hundred stripes 
to be inflicted on the ocean because his 
ships had been dashed to pieces and com- 
manded that the Phenician mechanics who 
built the ships should be put to death. If 
you think these measures show a reach of 
self-origination beyond the range of Xerxes 
as he is pictured in Esther, turn again to 
Herodotus and you will find that, true to 
type, Xerxes is represented as proposing 
neither penalty. Here again he merely 
seconds and adopts. Perhaps an exception 
should be made in the case of the many 
banquets occurring in Esther. I am inclined 
to think that his majesty was here the orig- 
inal proponent. The word "banquet," it 
may be added, occurs twenty times in Esther 



74 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

and only twenty times in the remaining 
thirty-eight books of the Old Testament. 
In other words, Ahasuerus and his trencher- 
mates consumed as much in five days as had 
been consumed by all the other Old Testa- 
ment characters from Genesis to Malachi, 
Ahasuerus was used for good in the story 
but he deserves and receives no credit for 
it. He is not so much a character, after all, 
as a state of mind or, better still, a state of 
body. No man ever missed a greater op- 
portunity. He was brought face to face 
with the two greatest world-civilizations in 
history, Hebraism and Hellenism; but, un- 
derstanding neither, he remains only a 
muddy place in the road along which Greek 
and Hebrew passed to world conquest. 

Haman was a fit minister for his king. 
Though a blend of vanity and cruelty and 
cowardice he was not without some power 
of initiative. But egotism had destroyed 
all sense of proportion in him. A sense of 
humor, that stabilizer of national and in- 
dividual character, was thus impossible to 
him. He begets laughter but was incapable 
of sharing it. He lives in history as one 
who, better than in Hamlet's immortal 
phrase, was " hoist with his own petard," 
the petard in Hainan's case being a gallows 



ESTHEE 75 

eighty-three feet high. He typifies also the 
just fate of the man who, spurred by the 
hate of one, includes in his scheme of ex- 
termination a whole people. "And he 
thought scorn to lay hands on Mordecai 
alone; for they had shewed him the people 
of Mordecai: wherefore Haman sought to 
destroy all the Jews that were throughout 
the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus, even the 
people of Mordecai." Collective vengeance 
never received a better illustration nor a 
more exemplary or lustrous punishment. 

Mordecai is altogether admirable in re- 
fusing to kowtow to Haman and in his un- 
selfish devotion to his fair cousin. The 
cause of the rooted enmity between him and 
Haman has been differently explained. But 
does it need explanation? It may have been 
that Haman wore on his person some idol- 
atrous symbol to which Mordecai would not 
do obeisance; it may have been that Mor- 
decai, a Benjamite, recognized in Haman, 
the Amalekite, an ancestral foe (1 Samuel 
15:33). But neither supposition is neces- 
sary and both do discredit to the kind of 
motivation employed by the author. Had 
he intended either of these motives to be 
central in the character of Mordecai he 
would have hinted or plainly indicated as 



76 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

much. What he evidently meant us to see 
as central and controlling in Mordecai's con- 
duct was a simple loyalty to the faith of his 
fathers that forbade the low and servile 
salaam to arrogant and aggressive pagan- 
ism. " But Mordecai bowed not, nor did 
him reverence." Where he felt no rever- 
ence, Mordecai would not flaunt the symbol 
of reverence. He would not commission 
his body to tell the lie that his spirit scorned 
to tell. 

But Esther is, of course, the central char- 
acter. She is the only character in the story 
and one of the few in the Bible whose per- 
sonal appearance is described and described 
unforgettably. Not only was she " fair and 
beautiful " but she " obtained favor in the 
sight of all them that looked upon her." 
The words are peculiarly presentive and pic- 
torial. Esther appears before us not only 
as " fair " but as winning " favor." There 
was something about her beauty that 
evoked not only admiration but good will. 
She was, I take it, a blend of Juliet and 
Cordelia, of Homer's Helen and Dante's 
Beatrice. 

But it is not her beauty that has sent her 
name down the ages. It is not her beauty 
that makes her the central and centralizing 



ESTHER 77 

character in the story. It is her hospitality 
to the great question put by Mordecai: 
" Who knoweth whether thou art come to 
the kingdom for such a time as this? " You 
will miss the distinctive note of the whole 
book if you do not weigh well the import of 
this question, for Esther's instant reaction 
to it marks the spiritual crisis of the book. 
Imagine the vacant and bovine countenance 
that would have been turned upon you if 
you had asked Ahasuerus or any of his sub- 
jects this penetrating question. But, if I 
mistake not, the question was an habitual 
one with Mordecai and Esther. It repre- 
sents an attitude rather than a gesture, a bit 
of Palestinian sky still visible from Persian 
soil, a strain of Judean music still heard 
amid the discords of pagan captivity. It is 
the one question in the book that runs the 
line of cleavage between heathen and 
Hebrew thought. By it and its answer 
we measure the altitude of the spiritual 
levels on which the captive Jews were living. 
They brought with them from Jerusalem 
and still cherished in Shushan the conviction 
that God had a purpose in each human life ; 
that events were to be scrutinized for divine 
beckonings ; that what was impenetrable to 
unbelief, or merely translucent to hope, was 



73 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

transparent to faith ; that national tragedies, 
like the captivity in Persia, had not only a 
collective meaning for the Jewish people but 
an individual meaning for each believing 
Jew: that chance and accident and fate had 
no place in the Jewish vocabulary; that a 
change of locale did not mean a change of 
morale; and that human life itself, though 
crowned with queenship, was to be thrown 
unhesitatingly into the scales if God's pur- 
pose could thereby find fulfillment. 

If Esther had been even tinctured by 
Persian fatalism she would have met Mor- 
decai's question by countering on the futil- 
ity of attempting to stay the march of 
things immutably ordered. Certainly it 
seemed futile, for not only had the decree 
of the king been sealed and sent but all 
petitionary access to his person had been 
denied. The Persian attitude to Mordecai's 
query finds its perfect expression in the 
later lines of one of Persia's greatest poets: 

/ The moving finger writes and having writ 
i Moves on, nor all your Piety nor Wit 
/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a line 
J Nor all your tears wash out a word of it. 

Or, if Esther had not been tinctured by 
Persian thought but had only grown lax 



ESTHER 79 

in her hold on Jewish thought, she would 
at least have denied the applicability of 
such a question to her. " Am I not 
queen?" she might have said. "Why I 
came to the land of Persia is no longer de- 
batable. See my robes and my crown. 
My queenship is the answer." Is there not 
a lesson for us here? Is success, mere suc- 
cess, ever an answer to the great " Who 
knoweth whether?" that knocks sooner or 
later at the door of each of us when we 
front a crisis? "Prosperity," says Bacon, 
"is the blessing of the Old Testament; 
adversity is the blessing of the New." This 
is not quite just to the Old Testament or 
to the New. Esther, at any rate, looked on 
her prosperity not as an end in itself but 
as only a means to an end. 

I have called this question with its answer 
the crisis of the story, and so it is. It is 
the result of all that has gone before and 
the cause of all that follows; it is the fruit 
of the past, the seed of the future. Back- 
ground, plot, and characters would, without 
this question and answer, be a shell without 
a kernel, a storage battery without power, 
a body without life, a wheel without an 
axle. u If his very initial sentence," says 
Poe, — read the lines again and see if first 



80 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

sentence and last sentence do not find in 
this question their common goal and tryst- 
ing-place. 

But this victorious question and answer 
control not only the structure but the 
spiritual significance of the story. " As cer- 
tain objects," says William James, 1 " natu- 
rally awaken love, anger, or cupidity, so cer- 
tain ideas naturally awaken the energies of 
loyalty, courage, endurance, or devotion. 
When these ideas are effective in an indi- 
vidual^ life, their effect is often very great 
indeed. They may transfigure it, unlocking 
innumerable powers which, but for the idea, 
would never have come into play." Among 
these " energy-releasing ideas " Professor 
James mentions "Flag," "Union," "Monroe 
Doctrine," " Truth," " Science," " Liberty." 

Among energy-releasing questions I 
should place first, " Who knoweth whether 
thou art come to the kingdom for such a 
time as this?" Not only did it unlock a 
reservoir of latent power in Esther but since 
her time men have gone to the stake, have 
built and torn down principalities and 
powers, have faced smiling a hostile world, 
have moulded the opinion of centuries, and 
transformed the conduct of ages on the 
"'The Energies of Men." 



ESTHEB 81 

dynamic conviction that they had been sent 
to the kingdom " for such a time as this." 

Esther is more than a short story. It is a 
bit of constructive idealism faultlessly con- 
ceived and faultlessly embodied. 



T 



IV 
JOB 

I 
f~ """^O feel the greatness of this book 
and to estimate its unique contribu- 
tion to Old Testament thought, let 
me suggest that you consider this problem : 
What would be the effect on the character 
of a community if every man in it thought 
that all adversity, whether of body, mind, or 
estate, was caused by sin secretly com- 
mitted and resolutely unconfessed. Your 
neighbor has money in a supposedly sound 
bank and wakes to find his hope of security 
for old age and of competence for those de- 
pendent upon him swept away in a night. 
You, a representative of the thought of such 
a community, could only say by way of com- 
fort: " Confess your guilt and thus stay the 
further impoverishment that will surely at- 
tend upon sin knowingly committed but 
publicly denied." The same neighbor loses 
by some ravenous epidemic all of his sons 

82 



JOB 83 

and daughters. " Villain and hypocrite," 
you must say to him, " have you no feeling 
for those near and dear to you? Proclaim 
your crime, keep back nothing, and thus 
arrest if you cannot avert the just doom of 
a righteous God upon the wider circle of 
those whom you are supposed to love." 
Your neighbor again wakes to find his body 
caught in the grip of a prolonged and tor- 
turing disease. Your prompt and consistent 
diagnosis is : " Every pang that you suffer 
is a penalty for divine law violated with full 
knowledge but with a craft and cunning 
that have hitherto evaded the scrutiny of 
your friends. Tell us all about it and thus, 
if you do not regain health, you may at 
least escape an impending and retributive 
death." 

I cannot imagine a tyranny more merci- 
less than the sovereignty of a philosophy like 
that would impose. Weakness is wicked- 
ness; all kinds and degrees of suffering be- 
come but so many incitements to Pharisaical 
denunciation; comfort, sympathy, kindness, 
generosity, fellowship, — why, these would 
be impossible and unthinkable in a com- 
munity governed by so heartless a code. 
But suppose that not only a community was 
so infected but the very fiber of a nation's 



84 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

faith ; suppose, too, that this nation was the 
nation from which the world's Saviour was 
to come, and this faith the faith that in a 
purer form was destined to alleviate and 
consecrate the very sufferings which this 
detestable philosophy stigmatized. Surely 
some national corrective would be needed 
and needed urgently. Such a corrective is 
the book of Job. 

If you are inclined to say, "Why, this 
doctrine seems to me so pagan and ab- 
horrent as not to deserve so elaborate a 
refutation," let me remind you that the book 
of Job not only refutes the old doctrine but 
substitutes the doctrine of Christ in its 
stead; that the patriarchal period of Jewish 
history with its pictures of teeming families, 
fields, and flocks, and with its advanced 
hygienic code, undoubtedly predisposed the 
nation to regard prosperity as inseparable 
from piety; that Christ more than once had 
to rebuke the same misinterpretation of cur- 
rent disaster; that the doctrine survives 
to-day in exact proportion as men believe 
blindly in a superior power but are ignorant 
of the existence of the laws of nature; that 
disease and death are in most cases traceable 
to violations of nature's laws, though these 
laws are of course not moral, their violation 



JOB 85 

being due to ignorance, not to sin ; and that, 
as Christ was Himself to be, like Job, " a 
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," 
the persistence of this doctrine without 
canonical check would have rendered His 
mission the more difficult and His character 
the more problematical. 

II 
Of the three divisions into which Job 
falls, — 

I. Job Chosen for Testing (1-2), 
II. Job and His Friends (3-37), 
III. Job and God (38-42), 

the first marks the central contribution of 
the book to the problem discussed. In 
these two chapters God is revealed as per- 
mitting Job to suffer in body, mind, and 
estate, not as a penalty but as a preroga- 
tive; not to appease the divine nature but 
to vindicate human nature; not to cast the 
patriarch down but to build him up; not 
because he was good and happy but because 
he could be made better and happier; not to 
fetter him in pain but to release in him those 
spiritual powers and appetencies of whose 
existence Job was himself ignorant till the 



86 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

days of testing came. That the level of 
these two chapters was far above the level 
of contemporary thought is proved by the 
fact that not one of Job's friends even 
hinted at such an explanation of his suffer- 
ing. 

These two chapters, though they have 
little of the imagery and eloquence of the 
succeeding chapters, mark one of the table- 
lands of divine truth. It was a pivotal 
moment in Hebrew history when the Maker 
of men was self-revealed as viewing char- 
acter not as protected innocence but as dis- 
ciplined virtue ; as proclaiming that 

Only the prism's obstruction shows aright 
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light 
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white; 

as bidding His followers in all after-ages to 
see in affliction not the mailed fist but the 
beckoning hand. The world had to wait 
till Christ came before it was to receive a 
revelation so energizing in its appeal or so 
assuaging in its effect. 

Like all great revelations in the Bible, 
this revelation of the ministry of adversity 
corresponded to an innate yearning of 
humanity and has found instant and trium- 
phant verification wherever men have risen 



JOB 87 

on " stepping-stones of their dead selves to 
higher things." I need hardly remind you 
that Goethe took the entire thought-process 
of Faust from these two chapters or that 
" the land of Uz " became at once not so 
much a geographical expression as the chal- 
lenge of a new faith and the psean of a new 
hope. The real land of Uz is not on the 
map. It is in the hearts of those who have 
passed through night to light, through 
storm to calm, through frost to spring, 
through woe to weal; who have built 
stepping-stones of stumbling-blocks; who 
have found that the via cruets is but another 1 
name for the via lucis. 

Ill 

But can man meet the test? Has he 
enough moral resilience to " find in loss a 
gain to match "? If the first two chapters 
are a revelation of the character of God, the 
thirty-five chapters that follow contain a 
corresponding revelation of the character of 
man. As far as the book of Job may be 
called a problem, these two divisions state 
it and solve it. Had Job known the con- 
tents of chapters one and two, had he been 
told that God was with him in his trial and 
permitted it only to educe the man in him 



$8 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

and to bless mankind through him, the 
struggle would not have been so long or so 
severe. If I estimate the character of Job 
aright, it would hardly have been a struggle 
at all. But Job did not know. He was 
thrown back on the fundamentals of his 
faith, on the bare essentials of his character. 
He was chosen as a test case to prove 
whether or not humanity could in the fire 
of affliction consume its dross and refine its 
gold. " The moral life of man," says 
Froude, " is like the flight of a bird in the 
air. He is sustained only by effort, and 
when he ceases to exert himself he falls." 
Carlyle and Browning have polarized the 
same stimulant thought in a hundred ways. 
But Job wrought out the great truth in the 
forge of his own experience long before it 
became a problem of psychology or a theme 
of literature. 

He did it too in solitariness that was in- 
tensified by the presence of four counselors 
who parroted the conventional common- 
places of the day but whose amazing self- 
righteousness put acid in Job's wounds 
instead of oil. It is hardly worth while to 
individualize these men. There were minor 
differences, it is true, but they all revolved 
around the conviction that Job had com- 



JOB 89 

mitted some monstrous crime and was too 
cowardly to confess it. I have always felt 
a measure of gratitude to them because they 
made Job talk. Without them he would 
probably have remained silent, and the re- 
sult of his testing would have been summed 
up for us at the end in a general and imper- 
sonal way. The quartet deserve no credit 
for it, but they compelled Job to self- 
defense through self-expression and thus 
made these chapters a sort of spiritual 
autobiography. 

But Job's replies reveal more than his 
own nature. They reveal the possibilities 
of language in the expression of soaring and 
elusive thought. You will miss much of the 
invigorating appeal of this book if you do 
not see in Job one of the sovereigns of 
speech. From his first word to his last he 
holds us in a sort of spell not merely because 
he speaks for us but because he is endowed 
with a range and adequacy and wizardry of 
utterance beyond the reach of any mortal 
that ever traversed that dim region of half 
lights and tried to tell what he saw. Pain, 
grief, doubt, dejection, these usually inhibit 
speech; but in this man they release and 
illumine it. Coleridge once defined dejec- 
tion as 



90 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

,A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, 
Which finds no natural outlet or relief 
In word, or sigh, or tear. 

That may be your dejection or mine, but it 
was not Job's. Dejection for him unlocked 
the treasuries of thought and feeling, of 
hope and will, of imagery and vision, and 
gave to each its fitting form and investi- 
ture. 

I do not know whether Job's vocabulary 
has ever been counted as they have counted 
Milton's and Shakespeare's. The mere 
number of words would not be large ; but in 
the use of these words, in making concrete 
terms like "day," "night," "stars," "twi- 
light," "sea," "brook," "wind," "cloud," 
" mountain," " snow," " storm," throw their 
changing splendors upon the arena of his 
struggle, in turning the currents of experi- 
ence into the central channel of expression, 
Job remains the supreme Old Testament 
model. Note the singing quality in him that 
finds beauty where only blankness and 
bleakness had been before. Most of us in 
Job's first mood would have said, " I wish 
I had never been born," and let it go at 
that. But Job moves to the dark thought 
in great spirals of sombre imagery : " Let 



JOB 91 

the day perish wherein I was born, and the 
night in which it was said, There is a man 
child conceived. Let that day be darkness ; 
let not God regard it from above, neither 
let the light shine upon it. Let darkness 
and the shadow of death stain it ; let a cloud 
dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day 
terrify it. As for that night, let darkness 
seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the 
days of the year, let it not come into the 
number of the months. Lo, let that night 
be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein. 
Let them curse it that curse the day, who 
are ready to raise up their mourning. Let 
the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; 
let it look for light, but have none; neither 
let it see the dawning of the day " (3 : 3-9). 
He longs for the grave and the grave is 
shot through with a strange and haunting 
beauty: "There the wicked cease from 
troubling; and there the weary be at rest. 
There the prisoners rest together; they 
hear not the voice of the oppressor. The 
small and the great are there; and the serv- 
ant is free from his master" (3:17-19). 
He cries out for wisdom and understanding, 
and in the very cry builds a palace for them 
to dwell in : " Where shall wisdom be 
found? and where is the place of under- 



92 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

standing? Man knoweth not the price 
thereof; neither is it found in the land of 
the living. The depth saith, It is not in me : 
and the sea saith, It is not with me. It can- 
not be gotten for gold, neither shall silver 
be weighed for the price thereof. It cannot 
be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the 
precious onyx, or the sapphire. The gold 
and the crystal cannot equal it : and the ex- 
change of it shall not be for jewels of fine 
gold. No mention shall be made of coral, 
or of pearls : for the price of wisdom is above 
rubies. The topaz of Ethiopia shall not 
equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure 
gold. Whence then cometh wisdom, and 
where is the place of understanding, seeing 
it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept 
close from the fowls of the air? Destruc- 
tion and death say, We have heard the fame 
thereof with our ears. God understandeth 
the way thereof, and he knoweth the place 
thereof; for he looketh to the ends of the 
earth, and seeth under the whole heaven, 
to make the weight for the winds; and he 
weigheth the waters by measure. When 
he made a decree for the rain, and a way for 
the lightning of the thunder, then did he see 
it and declare it; he prepared it, yea, and 
searched it out. And unto man he said, 



JOB 93 

Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wis- 
dom ; and to depart from evil is understand- 
ing " (28:12-28). 

But the resources of sudden and swift 
condensation are his also : " No doubt but ye 
are the people and wisdom shall die with 
you" (12:2). Nothing can be added to 
that; its victims are pilloried forever. The 
whole sweep of God's creative energy he 
curdles disdainfully in a sentence : " By his 
spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his 
hand hath formed the crooked serpent " 
(26:13). His own wretchedness lives for- 
ever in a phrase : " I am a brother to dra- 
gons, and a companion to owls " (30 : 29). 

Thomas Hughes says of Tom Brown's 
new fishing-rod : " It had play enough to 
throw a midge tied on a single hair against 
the wind, and strength enough to hold a 
grampus." The words are true of Job's 
power of speech. He did not have to com- 
pel words or ideas to do his bidding. They 
came when he beckoned and gave him all 
that they had of play and power, of sweep 
and challenge, to make his message find 
lodgment wherever in all the ages men 
should toil up from half knowledge to fuller 
knowledge or from voicelessness to articu- 
lateness. He touches nothing that does not 



94 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

become less angular, less fragmentary, less 
circumscribed. He thought not in parts 
but in wholes, not in hemispheres but in 
spheres, not in terms of here and now but of 
everywhere and always. He muffles the 
ache of the actual not by evasion or half 
statement but by a presentation so large, so 
representative, so luminous that his very 
litany has become both guide and solace. 
" The greatest thing a human soul ever 
does," says Ruskin, "is to see something 
and to tell what it saw. To see clearly 
is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in 
one." 

Thus if Job had not fought his way out, 
if he had remained in the valley, this part 
of the book would still be a bond of com- 
radeship in trial, because to be articulate is 
the first step to self-recovery. He would at 
least have probed the problem; he would 
have let air and sunlight in even if he him- 
self had not found a way out. The spokes- 
man precedes the leader, and to be the 
spokesman for those in the valley is at least 
to hint the victor on the heights. 

But Job is not merely the spokesman of 
those in the valley; he is the spokesman of 
those who climb from the valley to the 
heights. He is not a stationary character. 



JOB 95 

This differentiates him at once from his 
four friends. They make their exit from 
the same plane as that on which they made 
their entry. There is thought activity in 
them but no more progress than that made 
by a caged squirrel whirling the wheel of his 
little prison. But Job battles his way up 
and out. The world quotes him not only 
as voice for the voiceless but as hope for the 
hopeless. I need hardly remind you that, 
in spite of the usual classification, Job was 
never a sceptic. He had faith but wanted 
knowledge. His friends substituted super- 
ficial knowledge for fundamental faith and 
thus contributed nothing to the controversy 
except to intensify Job's sense of separa- 
tion from God and to make us realize 
how urgently the times called for a new 
philosophy of human suffering. 

The comparison of Job with Prometheus 
is not fruitful. Prometheus took the side 
of man against the Olympians whom he 
knew to be unmitigated rascals. There is 
no analogy here. In the case of GEdipus, 
with whom comparison is so frequently 
made, the central difference is that the 
Greek hero knew that he had done a mon- 
strous thing while the Hebrew knew that he 
had not. This difference is so vital that 



96 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

comparison is only contrast. Little more 
can be said of the parallel drawn between 
Job and Tabu-utul-Bel, the so-called Baby- 
lonian Job. 1 The latter cries out in his 
misery: 

The diviner has not improved the condition 

of my sickness ; 
The duration of my illness the seer could not 

state ; 
The god helped me not, my hand he took not ; 
The goddess pitied me not, she came not to 

my side. 

But a conjurer was found at last through 
whose magic the sufferer gained a triune 
blessing: he couldjtalk, swallow,. andUsgit : 

The tongue, which had stiffened so that it 

could not be raised- 
He relieved its thickness, so its words could 

be understood. 
The gullet, which was compressed, stopped 

as with a plug — 
He healed its contraction, it worked like a flute. 
My spittle which was stopped so that it was 

not secreted — 
He removed its fetter, he opened its lock. 

1 See George A. Barton's " Archaeology and the 
Bible" (1917), pp. 392-396; "Proceedings of the 
Society of Biblical Archaeology," X, 478; and Sir 
Henry C. Rawlinson's " Cuneiform Inscriptions," IV, 
60. 



JOB 97 

Equally unfruitful will be the attempt to 
weigh nicely the arguments of the five con- 
testants as arguments, to appraise them in 
terms of logical reply and counter-reply, to 
grade their relevancy or irrelevancy to what 
the preceding speaker has said. Argu- 
mentation in our sense, argumentation as a 
Burke or a Marshall or a Webster employed 
it, was unknown to the Hebrew. His lan- 
guage was not adapted to it. Connectives 
and particles, those indicia of voice and ges- 
ture on which all orderly and interrelated 
argumentation is dependent, are lacking in 
Hebrew though they swarm in Greek. The 
speeches of Job and his friends are not argu- 
ments; they are monologues, connected 
sometimes at the beginning with what the 
preceding speaker has said, but soaring free 
at the first opportunity and becoming more 
and more unrelated and self-originated as 
each speaker dips deeper into his own view- 
point. 

The superior interest in the content of 
Job's speeches does not lie, then, in their 
argument as such. It lies in their tri- 
umphant advance from seeming despair to 
faith and hope. A great nature, shaken to 
its center, is finding itself, not through the 
counsel of friends but in spite of such coun- 



98 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

sel. The speeches of these friends are but 
so many wheels revolving on the same axle. 
But Job's speeches are not circular but pro- 
gressive. They form a ladder with firm-set 
and luminous rounds. To find these rounds, 
to catch the radiance of the pinnacle mo- 
ments that light the way up, to mount with 
Job from strength to strength, this is the 
offering of these chapters ; this it is that has 
given them their immortality 'of service, 
their energy-releasing influence upon their 
readers. Perhaps no two of us would agree 
in our count of these moments, but none of 
us, I am sure, would omit such sayings as : 

" Though he slay me, yet will I trust in \ 
him" (13:15). 

" My witness is in heaven and my record 
is on high" (16:19). 

" I know that my redeemer liveth ,! 
(19:25). 

" When he hath tried me, I shall come 
forth as gold" (23:10). 

Each of these is a victory in itself and the 
herald of a greater victory yet to be; each 
marks an altitude won and not lost again; 
each is a mile-stone for nations as well as for 
individuals; each shows the essential one- 
ness of heroes in the Old Testament and 
those in the New; each shows the wisdom of 



JOB 99 

God in making probation the criterion of the 
soul's worth, and the ability of the soul amid 
all menaces to meet the test. Browning 
might well have had Job in mind when he 
wrote : 

No, when the fight begins within himself, 
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er 

his head, 
Satan looks up between his feet — both tug — 
He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul 

wakes 
And grows. Prolong that battle through his 

life! 
Never leave growing till the life to come ! 

One might indeed take these four sayings 
of Job and by relating them one to the other 
make of them a sort of system of faith 
triumphant. I shall not attempt it but I 
wish you to notice that when Job utters the 
first of these sayings the book passes at once 
from the category of the Greek drama, gov- 
erned by remorseless fatality, to the plane 
of the Shakespearean drama, where per- 
sonal will and faith and hope have a chance 
to win out over an imposed and implacable 
doom. But more significant still is Job's 
last quoted saying, " When he hath tried 
me, I shall come forth as gold." Here he 
rises level to the height of the first two 



100 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

chapters. He discovers and vindicates with- 
out God's interposition the very principle 
that was at issue in his trial. Is suffering 
punitive or is it remedial? Or, if we think 
it punitive at first, may we so accept and 
assimilate it as to make it remedial? Satan, 
who, as the world's prosecuting attorney, 
ought to have known better, believed that 
Job would interpret his affliction as un- 
merited and intolerable punishment; that 
he would not bear up under it; that, when 
he found the traditional contract between 
property and piety dissolved, he would blas- 
pheme and disintegrate : " Doth Job f ear 
God for naught? Hast thou not made an 
hedge about him, and about his house, and 
about all that he hath on every side? Thou 
hast blessed the work of his hands, and his 
substance is increased in the land. But put 
forth thine hand now, and touch all that he 
hath, and he will curse thee to thy face " 
(1:9-11). 

But Job has reached an altitude at which 
blasphemy is forever impossible. His char- 
acter instead of disintegrating crystallizes. 
When he identifies his own trial with the 
familiar process of the refiner refining his 
gold, his feet are upon a rock. He has dis- 
covered the spiritual law of gravitation and 



JOB 101 

has submitted himself to it. In exact pro- 
portion as his affliction increases he knows 
that there will be an increase of gold and a 
decrease of dross. Had he merely remained 
silent in his trial, had he merely not cursed 
God, Satan would have lost but God and 
humanity would not have won. When, 
however, he does not curse but recognizes 
remedial discipline in his chastisement, he 
not only vanquishes Satan but vindicates 
God and the human soul. He did more. 
He made that ash heap in the Old Testa- 
ment prophesy the Cross in the New. 

IV 
The third part of the book of Job, that 
embracing chapters 38-42, has been more 
diversely interpreted than any other equal 
section of the Old Testament. It has been 
said that it is the addition of a later and less 
skilful hand, that it is irrelevant to the main 
issue, and thus not a worthy or fitting con- 
clusion to what has gone before. An un- 
named writer in The Unpopular Reviezv * sum- 
marizes as follows: "The friends of Job 
argued that since he was unfortunate he 
must be wicked. Job knew better. But the 
author of the book had no solution. His 
J See issue for January-March, 1917. 



102 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

Jehovah, who should deliver the conclusion 
of the whole matter and close the discussion, 
delivers magnificent poetry, but throws no 
light on the subject, save the glare of his 
indignation that anything so insignificant as 
man should have any opinion about it. Job 
was silenced but not answered. The opin- 
ion of the author would appear to be that 
the problem was humanly insoluble." 

Before considering this facile indictment 
more in detail, let us read and reread the 
concluding part of Job. The patriarch is 
rebuked not for the things that he had said 
wisely but for the things that he had said 
unwisely. For the wise and brave things 
that he had said he receives the Lord's ex- 
press commendation. " For ye," says the 
Lord, referring to Job's friends, " have not 
spoken of me the thing that is right, as my 
servant Job hath " (42 : 7). But a child can 
see that Job had mingled mere glitter with 
his gold, that he had said many things that 
in a more tranquil mood he would regret 
and did regret : " Therefore have I uttered 
that I understood not; things too wonder- 
ful for me, which I knew not " (42: 3). If 
the author of the book had represented God 
as approving all that Job had said, he would 
have compromised the character of the In- 



JOB 103 

finite and made the conclusion of the book 
a jarring anticlimax. Think what strange 
inferences you would have to draw as to 
the character of God if you were told that 
He commended every complaint, every pro- 
test, every half truth that Job uttered. 
What He does approve and bountifully re- 
ward is Job's conduct, his vindication of 
suffering as discipline, his victorious nega- 
tion of Satan's challenge to human nature. 
Conduct, not talk, was the issue, and God's 
reproof of Job's " words without wisdom " 
was only to clear the way for a more unre- 
served commendation of the words and 
spiritual growth that merited no reproof. 

But God passes at once from a momentary 
consideration of Job's limitations to a re- 
view of the majesty and mystery of nature. 
Are these chapters (38-41) irrelevant? 
Only to those who have formed an obdurate 
preconception of how the book ought to end 
and refuse to have their preconception 
modified. Nowhere else in the Bible will 
you find so detailed a panorama of nature's 
ways or so eloquent a portrayal of her min- 
istry for men. It is an inspired commentary 
on the first chapter of Genesis. Genesis sums 
up the orderly and sequent emergence of 
nature at the command of God while these 



104 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

chapters show the wisdom and greatness of 
God not in creating but in preserving and 
sustaining the work of His hand. There is 
hardly an object of nature or a natural 
phenomenon of impressive import that is 
not summoned to the pageant that is made 
to defile before us. The purpose of it all is 
very plain. It is to remind Job that in all 
of his struggle he had missed a source of 
reassurance on which he might have drawn 
unfailingly. The very core of Job's afflic- 
tion had been that he could not see God, 
could not hear His voice, could not even 
find His footprints in the lone path along 
which he was journeying. He had talked 
much of nature's mysteries, had even recog- 
nized in them a certain law and order, but 
instead of seeing a beneficent God in them 
he saw only an absentee landlord who dis- 
dained to associate with his servants or 
tenants. His loneliness, his sense of utter 
isolation from the power that orbed above 
him or spread its glories around him, is well 
voiced by Tennyson's outcast, who also felt 
himself " exiled from eternal God " : 

A spot of dull stagnation, without light 
Or power of movement, seem'd my soul, 

'Mid onward-sloping motions infinite 
Making for one sure goal. 



JOB 105 

A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand, 
Left on the shore ; that hears all night 

The plunging seas draw backward from the 
land 
Their moon-led waters white. 

A star that with the choral starry dance 
Join'd not, but stood, and standing saw 

The hollow orb of moving Circumstance 
Roll'd round by one fix'd law. 

Yet all the while nature was calling to 
them both, was bidding them see not only 
law but providence and divine comradeship 
in all her manifestations. There is not a 
great poet in all literature, so far as I know, 
who has not found in nature at least a par- 
tial antidote to the sense of being left out 
and left behind from which Job was suffer- 
ing. Even Byron claims and claims justly 
the right to stand among those who find in 
nature what Job did not find : 

Some kinder casuists are pleased to say, 
In nameless print, that I have no devotion ; 
But set those persons down with me to pray, 
And you shall see who has the properest 

notion 
Of getting into heaven the shortest way ; 
My altars are the mountains and the ocean, 



106 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

Earth, air, stars, — all spring from the great 

Whole, 
Who hath produced, and will receive the soul. 

Philosophy, says Henri Bergson, will 
never become a serious matter till it does 
away with dogmatic systems and arrives at 
" the sense of not being alone in the world." 
The Ancient Mariner lost God when he lost 
fellowship with nature. He found God 
when fellowship with nature was restored 
through love and sympathy. 

But it is not only to the comradeship of 
nature that God calls Job ; it is to the mys- 
tery of nature, a mystery so vast and en- 
compassing that it offers healing for all 
minor mysteries. Job could not understand, 
could not find the mathematical formula for, 
God's dealings with him. These chapters 
ask him if he understands or can give the 
mathematical formula for anything in na- 
ture. Job asked for bread and got not a 
loaf but a bakery; he asked for water and 
got not a drop but a surf bath ; he asked for 
light and got not a taper but the full glare 
of the sun. " Study large maps," Lord 
Salisbury once urged; by demanding more 
than the section map, they yield more. The 
larger view is always the more sanative. 
The pool may rot but not the sea. It's 



JOB 107 

easier to swim in the ocean and there's less 
danger of sinking than in the bounded com- 
pass of the lake. 

The ministry of nature is taught in many 
passages in the Bible but it is never so 
massed and summarized as here. Jonah, 
sulking and whining because he could not 
understand God's treatment of him, was 
pointed not to the entire book of nature but 
to a mere foot-note, a gourd: "Then said 
the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, 
for the which thou hast not labored, neither 
madest it grow; which came up in a night, 
and perished in a night. And should not I 
spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are 
more than sixscore thousand persons that 
cannot discern between their right hand and 
their left hand; and also much cattle? " As 
Christ found it necessary to reenforce the 
lesson taught in the preceding sections of 
Job, that affliction is not penalty, so in the 
Sermon on the Mount He reenforces the 
lesson taught in the last section, that a con- 
sideration of nature's ways is an antidote to 
worry and a restorer of faith : " Behold the 
fowls of the air; for they sow not, neither 
do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet 
your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are 
ye not much better than they? Which of 



108 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

you by taking thought can add one cubit 
unto his stature? And why take ye thought 
for raiment? Consider the lilies of the 
field, how they grow; they toil not, neither 
do they spin. And yet I say unto you that 
even Solomon in all his glory was not ar- 
rayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God 
so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day 
is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall 
he not much more clothe you, O ye of little 
faith?" 

Let us return now to the charge of inde- 
cisiveness: " The author of the book had no 
solution. His Jehovah, who should deliver 
the conclusion of the whole matter/' etc. 
The critic seems to have reasoned thus: 
" Solutions ought to come last. But I find 
no solution in God's speech to Job. There- 
fore the book ends loosely and indecisively." 
It hardly needs to be said that the problem 
is stated and solved before God reappears. 
In chapters 1-2 Satan wagers that Job will 
see in suffering a whip ; God knows that he 
will see in it a ladder; in chapters 3-37 Job 
discerns the ladder and treads painfully but 
victoriously its ascending rounds. As I 
pass to the concluding chapters of the book 
there is no feeling of suspense as in a puzzle 
yet unsolved. There is eager interest to 



JOB 109 

know if, when judgment has been pro- 
nounced, God will reveal a way by which 
the sorely tried patriarch might have 
reached his goal with equal discipline but 
through less darkness. There is such a way 
and God reveals it. The " magnificent 
poetry " of the Lord's address to Job is not 
meant as a solution of what had already 
been solved but as a reminder that ail who 
suffer from a sense of God's remoteness and 
indifference may find in the greatness and 
harmony of nature the balm of a healing 
ministry, the assurance that in spite of mys- 
tery upon mystery — nay, because of it — 

God's in his heaven — 
All's right with the world ! 

If the critic insists on irrelevancy here, he 
must charge an equal irrelevancy when the 
Master bade His perplexed and anxious fol- 
lowers to behold the fowls of the air and to 
consider the lilies of the field. 

God, man, nature, these are the themes 
of Job, the greatest themes then and the 
greatest now. They are presented not as 
the theologian or the psychologist or the 
scientist would present them, for the appeal 
is not to the analytic intellect of man but 
to his suffering spirit that moves as in a 



110 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

world not realized, that finds mystery above, 
mystery within, and mystery round about 
The central problem of the book is not, 
Why do the righteous suffer? but How may 
all suffering, yours and mine and Job's, be 
transmuted into the larger life here, and 
become the pledge and herald of the un- 
ending life hereafter? 



v 

HOSEA 



it 



I 



OFTEN fancy," said Renan, " that I 
have at the bottom of my heart a city 
of Is, with its bells calling to prayer 
a recalcitrant congregation/' Is, you re- 
member, is the name of a submerged 
legendary city near the coast of Brittany, 
and the tradition is that during the roar 
of a storm the bells of the sunken city can 
still be heard. The figure is a fitting symbol 
not so much of the character of an indi- 
vidual as of the enduring service rendered 
by the prophets of the Old Testament. In 
periods of calm their voice is silent, but in 
every crisis of Hebrew history, whether the 
danger was from within or without, the 
prophets sounded the trumpet call to re- 
form and re-dedication. No other people 
was ever so blessed in leaders of wide 
horizon, who knew the right and knowing 
dared maintain. No other leaders ever 

in 



112 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

spoke in tones that rang clearer or carried 
farther. These ancient oracles, says J. H. 
Gardner, 1 have " a rugged grandeur and 
elevation which set them apart as almost the 
highest peak in the writings of men." 

As interesting as their work is, however, 
as literature, it is far more interesting in 
the content of its message. The more I 
read them the more I am convinced that, in 
spite of individual differences, one big 
thought gives unity to them all. Some, it 
is true, prophesied to the Northern King- 
dom, others to the Southern; some were 
educated, others were almost untutored; 
some spoke before the long captivity in 
Babylon, others during it, and still others 
after it. But though different as the waves 
they were one as the sea. And in their 
unity, in their convergence to a central con- 
viction, one finds a better starting point for 
their study than in the most elaborate sum- 
mary of their differences. 

I know of no single word that expresses 
this common denominator of the prophets, 
but an illustration will help. Did you ever 
see the Kentucky coffee tree? It still grows 
in the Mississippi Valley but it is threatened 
with extinction and for a very peculiar 
%ti The Bible as English Literature " (1906), p. 215. 



HOSEA 113 

reason. It has a pod like that of the locust 
tree but the beans inside the pod have a 
shell so hard that the living germ in each 
bean finds increasing difficulty in getting 
out. If the hardening process continues, as 
seems likely, the Kentucky coffee tree will 
go the way that all chickens would go if the 
little ones could not peck their way out. 

This hardening of the shell at the expense 
of the living germ within has played a much 
wider role in human history than in nat- 
ural history. And the Hebrew prophets, 
above all men that ever lived, have stood 
resolutely and unchangingly for the living 
principle within, and have battled even to 
the death against every encroachment of 
shell or husk. Whether the question was 
religious or social or political, whether it 
concerned the one or the many, these are 
the elect men in the Old Testament who 
championed the cause of truth against the 
changing forms of truth, who recognized 
with unerring vision the abiding worth of 
the inside and the comparative worthless- 
ness of the outside, who in every obligation 
looked for " the sprit that maketh alive " 
and fought the menace of " the letter that 
killeth." 

It is a strange twist in human nature that 



114 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

predisposes it to substitute the means for 
the end, to exalt the insignia above the 
thing signified, to flaunt the symbol rather 
than to practise the thing symbolized. It is 
the same predisposition to the external that 
confuses character with reputation, senti- 
ment with sentimentality, the statesman with 
the politician, the poet with the versifier. 
When Christ said, " The sabbath was made 
for man and not man for the sabbath," He 
summed up incomparably what the prophets 
had resolutely stood for. When He con- 
trasted the " tithe of mint and anise and 
cummin " with " judgment, mercy, and 
faith," He was expanding the same theme. 
When the President of the United States 
declared on that memorable second of 
April, that " the same standards of conduct 
and responsibility for wrong done shall be 
observed among nations and their govern- 
ments that are observed among the indi- 
vidual citizens of civilized states," he spoke 
in the very tones of the Hebrew prophets. 
There is, there can be, no surer test of a 
great thinker than the ability to discern as 
by intuition between the shell and what the 
shell was meant to conserve; and there is, 
there can be, no surer measure of heroism 
than the courage to take the side of the 



HOSEA 115 

inward and spiritual though all the world 
proclaim that the outward and visible is 
better. 

It is just this blended insight and fearless- 
ness that gave the Hebrew prophets their 
sovereignty over their own nation and has 
made all other nations their debtors. Read 
them again; mark the passages that, rising 
above the limitations of time and place, 
suggest how we of a more complex age may- 
resist the encroachments of the outer upon 
the inner. If you can assimilate from any 
prophet or from any passage a new insight 
into the permanency of principle and the 
transiency of ceremony you will have gained 
in mental and moral force along the whole 
battle line of truth and error. 

II 
You will find no difficulty in selecting 
from Hosea the great passage that pro- 
claims his stand in the war between the 
kernel and the shell : " For I desired mercy, 
and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of 
God rather than burnt offerings" (6:6). 
You will search the Old Testament in vain 
for a clearer or more resonant statement of 
the problem that seemed always at issue. 
The national temptation was to stress ritual- 



116 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

ism at the expense of the life-giving virtues 
of which ritualism was but the outer form. 
It is as if the nation had said, " We care not 
so much for the water that we drink as for 
the artistry of the cup that contains it" 
Put thus the error seems very palpable, but 
there is not one of us who does not need 
hourly the eloquent reminder of the prophet. 
There is not one of us who is not function- 
ing below his maximum because he is seek- 
ing for strength in externalities that have 
none. There is not one of us who does not 
at times suffer from a vague depression be- 
cause, though regular in our church duties, 
we are all the time living at the circumfer- 
ence, not at the center. There are writers 
to-day who pit themselves against the elder 
masters and ask in all honesty : "Are not my 
rimes and stanzas as regular as theirs? 
Are not my stories more artistically con- 
structed?" Yes, but what have you put 
into them? Your "sacrifice" is patent 
enough ; your " burnt-offerings " smoke 
from every page. But weigh the masters 
once more, not in the scales of manner or 
mannerism but of the urge and sweep of 
their message. Do not absorb what they 
say as the sponge absorbs water but as the 
leaf absorbs the rain. Do for your age 



HOSEA 117 

what they did for theirs. Relate your 
message to a present need as they related 
theirs to a past need that was then present. 

" Mercy and the knowledge of God, 
these," says Hosea, " are central." When- 
ever sacrifices cease to quicken the springs 
of mercy, whenever they do not relate them- 
selves consciously and actively to the heart 
within, whenever they fail to hint of a God 
who is merciful and who will in His own 
time by a supreme sacrifice show His in- 
finite mercy, — they are worse than useless. 
And whenever burnt-offerings are counted 
merely by their number, whenever they do 
not suggest sin purged away, whenever they 
fail to lead the mind on to the knowledge of 
a great High Priest who will yet take away 
the sins of the world, — they become an end 
in themselves and defeat the end for which 
they were ordained. But more than this, 
these great words of Hosea connote not 
merely the relation between mercy and 
sacrifice on the one hand and knowledge of 
God and burnt-offerings on the other. They 
connote the whole realm of duty that finds 
expression through any type or form, 
through any ceremony or symbol. 

That I do not overstate the meaning of 
Hosea's words let me remind you that 



118 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

Christ on two occasions in His life was re- 
proached by the Pharisees for doing or per- 
mitting what they considered unlawful. 
The questions at issue had nothing to do 
with sacrifices or burnt-offerings ; but in the 
Master's mind the underlying principle was 
exactly that which Hosea had stressed, and 
in both cases He quotes Hosea and urges 
His critics to seek the larger meaning of the 
prophet's words. "And it came to pass, as 
Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many 
publicans and sinners came and sat down 
with him and his disciples. And when the 
Pharisees saw it, they said unto his dis- 
ciples, Why eateth your master with pub- 
licans and sinners?" (Matthew 9:10-11). 
Does Jesus explain to them that the ques- 
tion is merely the old one of the outside 
versus the inside, of the shell versus the 
kernel? No, His reply is: "Go ye and 
learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy 
and not sacrifice. ,, 

A little later His disciples began to pluck 
and eat corn on the Sabbath day. " But 
when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto 
him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is 
not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day " 
(Matthew 12 : 2). There would seem at first 
glance to be little relation between eating 



HOSEA 119 

corn and offering sacrifices. Nearly eight 
centuries had passed and the day of sacri- 
fices and burnt-offerings was drawing to its 
close. But the relation between form and 
substance, between letter and spirit, had not 
changed, nor will it ever change. All this 
is summed again in Christ's reply : " If ye 
had known what this meaneth, I will have 
mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have 
condemned the guiltless." I can imagine 
no higher tribute to Hosea's words than 
that Christ should quote them twice and 
thus standardize them as the most compact 
statement of the great principle that all the 
prophets had proclaimed. 

Ill 
But every prophet in the Old Testament 
has his distinctive message apart from the 
general message of which he is only a co- 
deliverer. We have spoken of the chorus 
chanted in varying tones by all the prophets 
whether major or minor, whether of Israel 
or Judah. If Hosea's voice had greater 
carrying power than the others, the refrain 
itself was the same. Each prophet, how- 
ever, has a distinguishing note, a spiritual 
differential, that marks him off from all 
others. In Hosea's case the differential not 



120 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

only gives color and form to his entire 
message but has exerted an influence on 
Bible thought out of all proportion to the 
number of pages that contain it. The book 
itself has but fourteen short chapters, the 
last eleven prophesying the decline of Israel, 
the first three narrating the domestic 
tragedy that made Hosea and his message 
unique in all literature. 

That Hosea is to-day the most neglected 
and the most obscure of the prophets is 
due, I think, chiefly to one cause : a curious 
use of the divine imperative. This is a 
Hebrew characteristic but it culminates in 
Hosea. Suppose you had sailed on the ill- 
fated Titanic and, escaping with your life, 
had realized in later years that the experi- 
ence had broadened and enriched you, that, 
like Job, you had come out of the depths to 
dwell on the heights. You would tell it in 
the order of its occurrence. You would 
begin : "I embarked on a ship that I thought 
unsinkable." Not so Hosea. So clearly 
would he see in retrospect God's hand in all 
that had befallen him that he would inter- 
pret it and narrate it as the fulfillment of a 
divine command. He would have begun: 
" The Lord said to Hosea, Get thee into a 
ship that shall surely sink." Every detail 



HOSEA 121 

which he did not then foresee but which on 
reflection he found beneficent in result he 
would have translated not in ordinary past 
tenses, as you or I would have done, but in 
the urgent tones of the imperative mood, 
God Himself commanding. 

" Surely there are in every man's life," 
says Sir Thomas Browne, " certain rubs, 
doublings, and wrenches, which pass a while 
under the effects of chance; but at the last, 
well examined, prove the mere hand of 
God." Hosea had his full share of " rubs, 
doublings, and wrenches " but his rooted 
conviction was that God had planned his 
life as a whole and preordained every event 
in accordance with wisdom and mercy. He 
does not say, therefore, " I did this," but 
" God commanded me to do this." The 
goal becomes the starting place. He counts 
his mile-stones accurately but, as we should 
say, backward. 

Even this would not greatly perplex us 
provided the things done were not in them- 
selves wrong. But suppose that Jean Val- 
jean, the hero in Les Miser ables, who cer- 
tainly passed to moral heroism via evil deeds, 
had said in later years : " The Lord com- 
manded me to steal a loaf of bread, to take 
the silver plate from the Bishop, to snatch 



122 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

two francs from a child." We should have 
thought him a man of strangely inverted 
moral sense until we were told that this 
was only his way of saying that, looking 
back over his life, he believed that a divinity 
had shaped his ends, rough-hew them how 
he would. Autobiography thus written be- 
comes a series of divine commands, the 
author believing that God's permission is in 
effect an order. 

Turn now to the second and third verses 
of Rosea: " The beginning of the word of 
the Lord by Hosea. And the Lord said to 
Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whore- 
doms and children of whoredoms: for the 
land hath committed great whoredom, de- 
parting from the Lord. So he went and 
took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; which 
conceived and bare him a son." Compare 
the deterrent nature of this Introduction 
with the matchless Introductions to Genesis, 
Esther, and Job. But if translated so as to 
make clear the thought that Gomer's un- 
faithfulness came later and was only in 
retrospect linked with a command of God, 
the Introduction will take its place with any 
that have gone before. It not only intro- 
duces what is to follow but stamps Hosea 
as a man whose faith in God's leading made 



HOSEA 123 

tragedy in the traditional sense impossi- 
ble. 

Turn also to the second crisis in Hosea's 
life. Gomer had left him and sold herself 
as a common wanton. But Hosea's love 
for her knew no change. He buys her back, 
restores her to his home, and encompasses 
her with a love that was powerless to re- 
form her but that transformed him by its 
very purity and utter negation of self. As 
he thought it over, the hand of God was 
again as visible as in the marriage. Both 
were stages in the discipline of Hosea from 
which he issued the supreme laureate of love 
in the Old Testament. When he recounts 
it, the divine imperative comes again to the 
fore : " Then said the Lord unto me, Go yet, 
love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an 
adulteress, according to the love of the Lord 
toward the children of Israel, who look to 
other gods, and love flagons of wine. So 
I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of sil- 
ver, and for an homer of barley, and an half 
homer of barley : And I said unto her, Thou 
shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt 
not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be 
for another man: so will I also be for 
thee" (3:1-3). 

The story is a strange and appealing one, 



124 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

not because of the faithlessness of a worth- 
less woman but because of the effect on 
Hosea. Had he put her away, or had she 
and her betrayer been put to death (Deuter- 
onomy 22:22), all legal requirements would 
have been fulfilled. But instead of sub- 
mitting himself to a formal code, Hosea fol- 
lows the errant Gomer with a love and 
tenderness so pure, so solicitous, so undevi- 
ating that he was lifted to a realization of 
God's love not vouchsafed to any other 
prophet in the Old Testament. He had 
found it hard to understand how God could 
love an inconstant and unresponsive people. 
Now he understands it, for he has learned 
that love is not dependent on reward or re- 
turn, that it does not measure its outgoing 
by the prospect of a fixed income, that it 
has an absolute value of its own, that it 
emancipates the lover if not the loved, 

That it all sordid baseness doth expel, 
And the refined mind doth newly fashion 
Unto a fairer form, which now doth dwell 
In his high thoughts, that would itself excel. 

Browning, you remember, makes the dying 
St. John say : 

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, 
And hope and fear, — believe the aged friend,— 



HOSEA 125 

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love, 
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is. 

Hosea had learned it but learned it in a way 
as unexpected by him as was the wreck of 
his early hope. Edwin Markham has a few 
lines, the central thought of which might 
well be ascribed to Hosea: 

He drew a circle that shut me out — 
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout ; 
But Love and I had the wit to win — 
We drew a circle that took him in. 

But Hosea's circle not only took in the 
offending Gomer; it compassed the whole 
range of a new life ; its center had ceased to 
be self and had become in turn another, 
then love, then God. 

I do not believe that literature furnishes a 
parallel to the motif of the book of Hosea. 
" It is characteristic of August Strindberg, ,, 
says Archibald Henderson, 1 " that, in his 
effort to portray the most vital, most in- 
tense form of conflict, he should instinctively 
find his dramatic theme in the torturing con- 
flicts of his own family life." But Strind- 
berg uses the conflicts of his family life only 
as the means of venting an implacable hate. 
1 " European Dramatists " (1913), p. 46. 



126 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

That a man could be made purer and 
stronger by the power of a love that was 
not returned, that was even trampled in the 
mire, is a motif far beyond the ken of Strind- 
berg. In Crime and Punishment by Dosto- 
yevsky we have a murderer for the hero and 
a prostitute for the heroine; but the final 
regeneration of both is brought about in the 
traditional way, by love, suffering, and serv- 
ice, shared and ennobled. In the Scarlet 
Letter Hawthorne inhibits all sympathy with 
the wronged husband by making him the 
very nemesis of unforgetting and unforgiv- 
ing malignity. " The Hosea motif has in- 
terested me also," writes Dr. R. A. TsanonV 
" not as an object of research but as an 
ethical problem and as a literary idea. I am 
not aware of any modern Hosea. Is the 
idea alien to us that it has not been utilized 
in literary material more often? Do you 
suppose that man has gone about the busi- 
ness of saving his soul by the direct road? 
We must be spiritually more selfish than we 
imagine. ' Whoso would save his own life 
must save that of another.' " 

Men doubtless pointed the finger of scorn 
at the prophet but the happiest man, the 

1 Author of " The Problem of I<ife in the Russian 
Novel" (1917), 



HOSEA 127 

freest man, the highest man in Israel was 
Hosea, the son of Beeri, but not because he 
did not visit legal punishment upon Gomer. 
Nowhere is it intimated that his treatment 
of Gomer should become the model for 
similar cases. By no means. But the man 
had found himself, had felt the slipping 
away of narrowness and selfishness, had ex- 
perienced an emotion so novel and yet so 
abiding and blessed that he knew that the 
finite within him had touched the infinite 
above him. He did not stop to analyze it 
all; it never occurred to him to seek to 
justify himself by recourse to the law of the 
land. No, he hastened to write down not 
a new method with faithless wives but a 
new conception of God. " Just as I," he 
reasoned, " love Gomer in spite of her de- 
fection, so does God, though in a vaster 
way, love Israel in spite of its rebellious- 
ness/' And from that moment the new con- 
ception of God began to spread throughout 
Israel and from Israel throughout Judah. 
Religion became at once and has continued 
less and less a matter of formal adherence 
to an imposed code and more and more the 
power of a full-orbed life that has love of 
God at its center and glad service as its 
expression. 



128 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

A Deity believed is joy begun, 
A Deity adored is joy advanced, 
A Deity beloved is joy matured. 

Major and minor prophets catch the im- 
port of the larger vision and chant its beauty 
and its appeal to an ever widening circle of 
listeners. When the book of Deuteronomy 
was brought from its long seclusion a cen- 
tury later and men heard once more the 
words, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, 
and with all thy might/' did not neighbor 
exchange glances with neighbor and talk 
again of the message of Hosea? Had not 
this single prophet of Israel done more to 
prepare both king and people for the recep- 
tion of the new message than any prophet 
who had lived in the long interim? The 
last chapter of the last book of the Bible 
returns again to the marriage figure first 
employed by the first prophet. God is 
wedded to the Church but the Church has 
made itself worthy. Hosea does not say, 
" God is love." That was reserved for him 
who had seen the Christ and therefore 
knew. But closest to St John among the 
prophets, as St. John was closest to Christ 
among the disciples, is the figure of Hosea, 
husband of Gomer. 



VI 
THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 



ii 



D 



O not regard the Gospels as biog- 
raphies — they are only sketches." 
This warning or its equivalent 
one finds prominently posted in nearly every 
Introduction to the New Testament or Life 
of Christ or special edition of any one of the 
four Gospels. The next few years, how- 
ever, are going to witness a complete re- 
versal of the current view and the Gospels 
are going to be recognized not only as biog- 
raphies but as the first biographies known 
in literature. Stranger still, when the King 
James translation of the Bible appeared in 
1611 the English language had even then no 
native biography to its credit. The four 
Gospels were, therefore, the first biographies 
to be put into English, and not until old Sir 
Isaac Walton entered the field a generation 
later was there an English biography that 
could be even grouped with the four master- 
pieces that usher in the New Testament. 
The pivot on which the whole question 

turns is the word or rather the concept per- 

129 



130 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

sonality. " Biography," says Sir Sidney 
Lee, 1 " aims at satisfying the commemora- 
tive instinct by exercise of its power to 
transmit personality." Samuel Parr, who 
had intended to write the life of Dr. Samuel 
Johnson, said of his proposed work : " I had 
read through three shelves of books to pre- 
pare myself for it. It would have contained 
a view of the literature of Europe. . . . 
It would have been the third most learned 
work that has ever appeared." But it would 
not have been Johnson and would not, there- 
fore, have merited the name of biography. 
Boswell, whose Life of Johnson remains the 
measure of biographic excellence in all lan- 
guages, said of his work: " I am absolutely 
sure that my mode of biography, which 
gives not only a history of Johnson's visible 
progress through the world . . . but a 
view of his mind ... is the most per- 
fect that can be conceived." It is not the 
number of facts, or the orderly arrangement 
of them, or the pains taken in securing them, 
that makes a work a biography. There 
must be the clear recognition of the per- 
sonality of the man about whom you write, 
and this recognition must control the choice, 

1 See his " Principles of Biography," and Walter H. 
Dunn's " English Biography " (1916). 



THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 131 

the order, and the significance of the facts 
presented. If your work does not transmit 
personality, it may still be informing, but it 
is not biography. If it does transmit per- 
sonality, however few the facts and however 
many the gaps, you have achieved a biog- 
raphy. 

Does not each of the four Gospels trans- 
mit the personality of Christ? Is not this 
their central theme? Not one of them at- 
tempts to fill in each year or any one year of 
Christ's life. But the incidents selected are 
vitally significant; the sayings are steeped 
in personality; the deeds speak as con- 
vergently as the sayings; even the things) 
omitted testify to unity of conception; ant 
the harmony of the whole is itself a sort of 
miniature biography. It was not the power 
of Christ that drew His disciples to Him : 
it was the magnetism of His personality. 
It was this that held them, and it was this 
that they tried to body forth in their teach- 
ings and writings. Compare the Gospels 
with any of the countless Lives of the 
Saints. There is no selective genius in the 
latter, no sensitiveness to the elements that 
make for personality ^enumeration takes the 
place of interpretation; gaps are fluently 
filled witlTthe irrelevant and the non-essen- 



132 KEYHOTE STUDIES 

tial; «i&e^sis_everywhere usurps the func- 
tion _of exegesis. To^niy^minlr nothing 
speaks more eloqtrently of the divine per- 
sonality of Christ than the unwillingness of 
the Evangelists to obtrude their own com- 
ments or to itemize the unrecorded years by 
additions of their own. The gaps were as 
evident to them as to us, but the personality 
that moves through their pages had power 
to impose silence as well as to compel 
speech. 

II 

And yet, though the four Gospels are the 
first four biographies, though they are one 
in the common attempt to limn the most 
marvellous personality that ever appeared 
among men, John's method marks a dis- 
tinct advance upon that of his predecessors. 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke saw the person- 
ality of Christ most clearly reflected in the 
deeds that proclaimed Him the Son of God 
and in the words that proclaimed Him the 
supreme teacher of righteousness and salva- 
tion. "What did He do? " "What did He 
say about duty to God and man?" — these 
questions furnish the clue to the first three 
Gospels. But the clue to John's Gospel is 
" Who is He? " This question is far deeper 
in its reach and wider in its implications 



THE GOSPEL OP JOHN 133 

than the other questions. By answering it 
John's Gospel not only supplements the 
other Gospels; it underlies them. It is not 
so much roof as foundation. Tell me who a 
man is and I can tell you whether his deeds j 
and doctrines are emanations from within 
or additions from without. Matthew, Mark, 
and Luke, for example, all record the 
miracle of Christ's feeding the five thou- 
sand. John alone adds that Christ said : 
" I am the bread of life : He that cometh to 
me shall not hunger; and he that believeth 
on me shall never thirst" (6:35). This is 
not a case of gathering up the fragments 
that the other Evangelists had left: it is the 
central and abiding part of the miracle. 
The actual loaves were but fragments of the 
creative " I am." 

Artists talk of the Raphael touch. It is 
the addition to a painting, whether in con- 
ception or execution, that only Raphael 
could give. The St. John touch is as clearly 
marked among the biographers of Christ as 
the Raphael touch among Renaissance 
artists. Haunting beauty of phrase, a per- 
vasive suggestiveness as of depth below 
depth in the thought, perfect unity in tex- 
ture and pattern, wide horizons beckoning 
always, the divine so clearly envisaged that 



134 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

it seems the human and the human so 
irradiated that it seems the divine — these 
are evident at even a first reading. But be- 
neath these, giving wholeness and sym- 
metry to every part, is the quest for that 
central font in Christ which we, veiling our 
ignorance, call personality. Only the first 
stages of this quest had been attained by 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It was left for 
John to recall and record those sayings of 
• our Lord in which " I am," surpassing in 
content both miracle and parable, proved at 
last the most revealing miracle and the most 
illuminating parable. 

Try to think what a blank there would be 
in the world's knowledge of Christ and in its 
fellowship with Him if we did not know that 
He said: 

" I am the living bread which came down 
from heaven : if any man eat of this bread, 
he shall live forever" (6: 51). 

" I am the light of the world : he that fol- 
loweth me shall not walk in darkness, but 
shall have the light of life " (8: 12). 

" I am the door: by me if any man enter 
in, he shall be saved " (10: 9). 

" I am the good shepherd : the good shep- 
herd giveth his life for the sheep " (10: 11). 

" I am the resurrection and the life : he 



THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 135 

that believeth in me, though he were dead, 
yet shall he live" (11:25). 

" I am the way, the truth, and the life : no 
man cometh unto the Father, but by me " 
(14:6). 

" I am the true vine, and my Father is the 
husbandman" (15:1). 

" I am the vine, ye are the branches : 
he that abideth in me, and I in him, the 
same bringeth forth much fruit" (15: 5). 

Note, too, that if Christ does not say " I 
am love " in so many words, He says it in 
passages of which " I am love " is only the 
crystallization. "A new commandment I 
give unto you, that ye love one another; as 
I have loved you, that ye also love one an- 
other " (13:34). It was not a new com- 
mandment that they should love one an- 
other, but it was new that they should love 
one another as He had loved them, He who, 
being life and light, was necessarily love. 
When John says, therefore, in his First 
Epistle, " God is love " (4: 8), he is but in- 
terpreting and summarizing the passages 
about love that he had already recorded in 
his Gospel. 

It is these great " I am " passages and the 
passages that radiate from them that give 
distinctive character and appeal to John's 



136 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

^ Gospel. Not one of these passages is found 
in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Matthew at 
least must have heard Christ when He 
uttered these words but Matthew's ear was 
\ not as finely attuned to spiritual undertones 
1 as John's. The best loved disciple, had he 
Uvritten as early as Matthew or Mark or 
I Luke, might have supplemented their 
records merely with more miracles and 
more parables. As the years passed, how- 
ever, reflection taught him new values. 
Autobiography is a kind of biography, but it 
comes later. John's Gospel is in a sense 
autobiography succeeding biography. But, 
if the distinction may be made, it is a new 
kind of autobiography, Christ revealing 
Himself not merely in His own words, but 
in those words that connote inner being 
rather than outer action. The verb to be 
takes precedence of the verb to do. To note 
and record this kind of self-revelation de- 
mands a sensitiveness to the meaning of 
personalia, a delicacy of spiritual interpreta- 
tion, a balance between observation and re- 
action to observation, a faculty of recon- 
structive thinking, a passion for ultimate 
rather than mediate things that only a few 
have had and not one in equal measure with 
St. John. 



THE GOSPEL OP JOHN 137 

HI 

It is often said that St. John's Gospel 
shows the evidence of Jewish Alexandrian 
philosophy, that it was written to offset cer- 
tain speculative tendencies that had become 
current since the appearance of the first Gos- 
pels. The argument seems to me greatly 
overworked. The speculative philosophy 
of his day may have tinged St. John's 
vocabulary here and there but there is no 
need to invoke its aid further. The central 
current of the Fourth Gospel finds its chan- 
nel not in outside influences but in the char- 
acter of St. John, in the limitations of the 
Gospels already written, and in the crisis 
through which Christianity was passing 
when only one of the elect twelve was left 
to testify of his Master. Let us note these 
briefly in order. 

Though we know little of St. John's life 
outside of his writings, the character of the 
man is self-portrayed in his Gospel, his three 
Epistles, and the Book of Revelation. In 
bulk Luke contributed more to the New 
Testament than any one else, but in variety 
John stands easily first. Luke excels in 
pure narration, in the clear and orderly 
sequence of events, the single event being 
with him the narrative unit. But in casual 



138 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

connection, in atmosphere, in absolute har- 
mony of tone, in mastery of all forms of ex- 
pression that hint more than they say and 
quicken to their full capacity all types of 
receptive intelligence, John has no equal. 
His unit is never the bare event, never the 
mere deed. In his Gospel the unit is the 
heart-beat of personality; in his Epistles it 
is the note of fellowship with the Father, 
from which the deed springs as flower from 
seed ; in the Apocalypse it is the symbol that 
foreshadows the event. The event flashes 
and is gone ; the matrix from which it arose 
abides. A man who felt as John felt, who 
saw life from his angle, who was privileged 
to be the intimate of Christ, who was known 
preeminently as the disciple whom Jesus 
loved, and who was commissioned by Jesus 
from the cross to be son to Mary in His 
stead, would not need to have his Gospel 
shaped by current philosophies. It sprang 
from a character naturally malleable to 
spiritual pressures. It was the reaction of 
an intense personality to the personality of 
One who combined in Himself every height 
that John had glimpsed in experience or 
vision. 

But the limitations of Matthew, Mark, 
and Luke called for a Fourth Gospel as in- 



THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 139 

sistently as did the native bent of John's 
character. What they recorded they re- 
corded in a form and spirit beyond the cen- 
sure of even hostile criticism. What was 
beyond their ken, what did not seem to 
them central and organic in the Master's 
life, they omitted. They never for a mo- 
ment doubted that He was the Son of God 
and the promised Messiah. Matthew's 
Gospel is indeed a sort of Panama Canal 
between the Old Testament and the New. 
The supreme revelation of Christ's per- 
sonality was in Matthew's mind that He was 
the long-looked-for Messiah, that in Him 
the tides of both dispensations met. 
Matthew was eager to record every event 
in Christ's life to which could be added, 
" That it might be fulfilled." Mark cared 
less for fulfillment and more for the achieve- 
ments that heralded Christ as the Son of 
God. Luke's Gospel is the synthesis of the 
two, it being as he tells us a " treatise of all 
that Jesus began both to do and to teach " 
(Acts 1:1). 

But men were constantly asking a ques- 
tion which these Gospels did not adequately 
answer. " Suppose He is the Messiah and 
the Son of God. This is only His office, His 
relationship. Tell us not what He is but 



140 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

who He is." This demand recurs again and 
again in the first three Gospels. " Some 
say that thou art John the Baptist: some, 
Elias; and others Jeremias, or one of the 
prophets" (Matthew 16 :14). "Is not this the 
carpenter, the son of Mary?" (Mark 6:3). 
"Is not this Joseph's son?" (Luke 4:22). 
This question must have gathered momen- 
tum as the Gospel was preached in distant 
lands; it must have deepened in meaning in 
proportion to the range of thought of those 
that asked it. To say that Christ was the 
Messiah or the Son of God or, as He called 
Himself, the Son of Man, was not in itself 
to link Him with universal human need, to 
bring Him home to men's business and 
bosoms, to make Him the comrade of all the 
ages. Another answer was needed, an an- 
swer less cryptic, and more soluble in the 
daily wants of ordinary humanity. Christ 
had Himself given the answer in many self' 
revealing discourses but these had found no 
place in the Gospels already extant. Life, 
light, love, truth, the door, the way, the liv- 
ing bread, — the identification of Christ with 
these recurrent and elemental needs was to 
prove not merely a vaster interpretation but 
almost a rediscovery of the Saviour of men. 
In addition, however, to the character of 



THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 141 

St. John and to the lacunae in the Gospels 
that preceded his, there is another con- 
sideration that cannot be omitted in any 
survey of the hinterland from which issued 
the Fourth Gospel. Put yourself in the 
place of the Evangelist. His fellow disciples 
were dead and he alone survived of those 
who had journeyed with Christ, conversed 
with Him, and seen with their own eyes the 
mastery that He exercised over nature, dis- 
ease, and death. John could still convince 
the doubters by saying, " I knew Him, I 
heard Him, I saw Him heal the sick and 
raise the dead." The argument from per- 
sonal contact and personal observation must 
have had the same force then as now. 
Human nature at bottom has not changed. 
But John lived on into an age in which the 
thought must have come to him with in- 
creasing force : " How will it be when I am 
gone? When none is left to say ' I saw '? " 
This crisis in the history of Christianity 
John seems to me to have previsioned far 
more vividly than any of his predecessors. 
It was a crisis which Christ had not only 
foreseen but provided for in discourses 
which John alone was to record. Those 
long centuries that were to heap themselves 
upon the short years of Christ's ministry, 



142 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

the new nations and languages and civiliza- 
tions that were to thrust themselves be- 
tween, the vast abysm of time across which 
men must look and listen to see the face and 
to hear the voice of the Son of Man, the cry 
that would go up so often from waiting 
hearts, " Could I but see Him and touch the 
hem of His garment " — this was a burden 
which Christ bore in advance, a chasm which 
He bridged so that all succeeding genera- 
tions might pass securely over. 

But the story of the miracles wrought in 
the olden time would not alone avail for 
these waiting centuries and St. John deals 
more sparingly in miracles than any other 
Evangelist. TJae^mir^cle jifter^all is only a 
sort of first aid to the unbelieving. ~~ r 03fessed 
are they/' says Jesus, " that have not seen, 
and yet have believed" (20:29). Nor 
would additional parables have met the 
need. The parable is the unapproached 
model of much in little but it shows Christ 
as the matchless teacher rather than as the 
companion whose personality will enrich all 
personalities that come within its orbit. 
What these waiting centuries wanted was/ 
not new evidence that Christ had lived and 
had taught but that He was still living and 
still teaching. The emphasis must now be 



THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 143 

put on those qualities of Christ's personality 
which each man, in whatever century he 
lived, could test for himself, could apply to 
his own spirit needs, could instantly vindi- 
cate in his own experience. Men do not 
argue about bread : they taste it. 

John's faith was no longer dependent on 
the miracles and wonders that he had seen 
Christ do. These were but scaffolding; 
their support was no longer needed. John 
calls them signs, never miracles, — signs of 
a continuing presence behind them that in- 
finitely transcended in faith value any one 
of them or all of them. External evidence, 
the evidence of John's eye and ear, had 
found internal warrant, the warrant of an 
answering life. And this new stage in the 
Apostle's faith forecast accurately the whole 
future appeal of Christianity. The time had 
come when the nature of the evidence for 
the living Christ must be changed. Those 
who are to hand the torch down the ages 
must have more to say than, " Believe on 
Him because of the wonderful works which 
we can prove that He did, and the wonder- 
ful doctrines which we can prove that He 
taught." They must know those self-evi- 
dencing qualities, those self-vindicating 
virtues, those self-validating forces which 



144 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

stream from the personality of Christ and 
which defy alike the corrosion of time that 
has been and the menace of time yet to be. 
They must say, " Christ is not a past his- 
tory: He is an abiding life, not to be rea- 
soned about but to be lived. Appropriation, 
not argumentation, is the key-word." This 
is how John's Gospel met the crisis of the 
coming centuries. 

IV 
Among the radiant words about which 
the Evangelist's thought loves to circle, is 
it possible to select one that may rightly be 
said to sound the keynote of the Fourth 
Gospel? I think so. That word is life. 
Light, love, truth, and all the rest are but 
branches of this vine, though, like the 
branches of the banyan tree, they may dip 
down and become the roots of the new life 
themselves. But 

'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, 
Oh life, not death, for which we pant. 

This Gospel says and suggests more of life, 
of its potential beauty and power, of its 
height and depth, of its reach and range and 
possibility, of its beginning and growth and 



THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 145 

culmination in Christ, than is said or sug- 
gested in all the rest of the New Testament 
combined. 

It is life with which it starts. Mark had 
begun his Gospel with the baptism of 
Christ; Luke with the annunciation to 
Mary; Matthew with "Jesus Christ, the son 
of David, the son of Abraham." But John 
begins by saying there is no such thing as 
B. C. The life of Christ had no beginning. 
All is A. D. And he closes his Gospel on 
the same infinite note. If all the activities 
of this life, even during its ministry of a 
paltry three years, should be recorded, " I 
suppose that even the world itself could not 
contain the books that should be written. ,, 
This is not exaggeration. It is merely a 
human attempt to express the infinite, to 
bind in the radiations of a life that had no 
beginning and can have no end. 

It is life restored in whole or in part that 
forms the theme of every miracle recorded 
by John, every miracle, that is, that has to 
do with men. " Thy son liveth," cry the 
servants to the anxious nobleman. " So 
the father knew that it was at the same 
hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy 
son liveth " (4: 53). The impotent man at 
the pool of Bethesda had waited thirty-eight 



146 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

years for some one to put him into the heal- 
ing spring. " Jesus saith unto him, Rise, 
take up thy bed, and walk. And immedi- 
ately the man was made whole" (5:8-9). 
To another He said, " Go, wash in the pool 
of Siloam " (9:7), and the poor fragment 
of life washed and was made whole. Before 
the resurrection of Lazarus were the words : 
" I am the resurrection and the life : he that 
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet 
shall he live" (11:25). This, rather than 
" Lazarus, come forth," was the divine im- 
perative to which death gave heed. And 
the raising of Lazarus was but itself a 
gesture of infinite personality, a mere inci- 
dent in the dateless sovereignty of the Lord 
both of life and of death. 

Finally, it is life that in John's own words 
gives the central purpose and import of his 
Gospel. The ministry of this Gospel thus 
confirms and encompasses the ministries of 
the three Gospels that precede it; but John 
adds as its ultimate ministry that the life of 
One might flow through the sluice-gate of 
faith into the life of all. "And many other 
signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his 
disciples, which are not written in this book. 
But these are written that ye might believe 
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; 



THE GOSPEL OP JOHN 147 

and that believing ye might have life 
through his name " (20: 30-31). 

V 
The older commentators used to make 
much of symbols in their interpretation of 
the Gospels. Matthew was represented by 
a man, Mark by a lion, Luke by an ox, and 
John by an eagle. As the eagle, scorning 
the earth, loves to soar into the mysterious 
blue, and to roam through skyey spaces 
measureless to man, so John, it was thought, 
loves to poise at dizzy heights, and to sweep 
through realms impenetrable to eye or 
mind. But the figure is not apt. No, not 
the eagle is the fitting symbol of the Fourth 
Gospel. If we are to find our symbol 
among the inhabitants of those argent 
spaces between earth and sky, let us choose 
one that shall suggest neither aloofness nor 
solitariness. Let it be one that seeks the 
upper levels of air, seeks them daily, but 
only that it may return and bring the rap- 
ture of the heights into the humbler life of 
the plain. Not the eagle shall be our sym- 
bol but the skylark, 

Type of the wise who soar, but never roam ; 
True to the kindred points of Heaven and 
Home. 



VII 

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 

i 

THE best way to know a great writer 
is to approach him via his favorite 
theme or themes. If I were going 
to lecture on Matthew Arnold and had at 
my disposal only two lecture periods I 
should in the first hour say nothing about 
Arnold himself but devote the time wholly 
to the question of culture. If Carlyle were 
the subject the approach would be by way 
of shams. Tennyson and Browning would 
be prefaced by a discussion of the two kinds 
of progress: first, the slow, uniform, incre- 
mental kind that a ball makes when it 
moves in a leisurely way over a level floor; 
second, the irregular and intermittent kind 
that a tumbling box makes as it is kicked 
from one point to another; Tennyson stands 
for the first, Browning for the second. In 
the case of Emerson, self-reliance would be 
the keynote. O. Henry would require a 

148 



THE EPISTLE TO THE BOMANS 149 

talk about the man down and out, his de- 
sire to get back, his unwillingness to be per- 
manently classed as bad or useless. Wood- 
row Wilson would compel us first of all to 
front the question whether we had not heard 
too much about the rights of democracy and 
too little about its duties. 

To know St. Paul you must think as you 
have never thought before about the limita- 
tions of law. This is the theme that he 
made peculiarly his own and by making it 
his own made it also a part of the thought 
of nineteen centuries. No one can read the 
Epistle to the Romans or the Epistle to the 
Galatians without seeing at once that the 
great Apostle's mind had been revolving 
about this problem long before he made his 
journey to Damascus. From that journey 
he returned a Christian but his growing con- 
sciousness of the limitations of law not only 
predisposed him to accept Christ instantly 
but gave to his acceptance an intellectual 
authoritativeness impossible before. 

Of course by law Paul does not mean 
what we to-day mean by natural law. The 
law of gravitation, the laws of heat, of sound, 
of light did not enter into the Apostle's 
thinking. No one can speak of the limita- 
tions of these laws because they are not 



150 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

limited. They are coextensive with the 
sovereignty of nature : or, if they have their 
limitations, God alone knows it, not we. It 
was chiefly of natural law that Hooker was 
thinking when he wrote the famous words :* 
" Of law there can be no less acknowledged 
than that her seat is the bosom of God, her 
voice the harmony of the world; all things 
in heaven and earth do her homage, the 
very least as feeling her care, and the great- 
est as not exempted from her power." 
These words suggest St. John rather than 
St. Paul. 

Fortunately we are not left in doubt as to 
the kind of law that St. Paul had in mind. 
" I am verily a man," he said in his defense 
at Jerusalem, " which am a Jew, born in 
Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in 
this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught 
according to the perfect manner of the law 
of the fathers " (Acts 22 : 3). You will find 
" the law of the fathers " summarized in the 
twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and 
twenty-third chapters of Exodus. If these 
chapters contain a few laws or "judgments" 
that hardly seem to us worth the effort of 
St. Paul to invalidate, let us remember that 
they contain also the Ten Command- 
1 " Ecclesiastical Polity," Book I, Chapter 16. 



THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS 151 

ments, — laws that have guided and shaped 
the destiny of civilization in all lands. It 
is no man of straw, then, that the Apostle 
sets up. He is concerned with the very 
concept of law itself, and what he says ap- 
plies to Gentile as well as to Jew, to modern 
society as well as to ancient. Moses is no 
more truly the lawgiver of the old dispensa- 
tion than Paul is the law interpreter of the 
new. 

II 

The theme of Romans is usually said to be 
justification by faith. But this is far too 
narrow a view. It puts the emphasis, more- 
over, on the wrong word. Faith is the 
great word ; justification is one and only one 
of its fruits. If you view the book other- 
wise its center will not be in the middle. 
Paul nowhere defines faith. 1 He illustrates 
it, illuminates it, contrasts it with law and 
works, lets us feel the glow of it, but no- 
where tries to circumscribe it with a defini- 
tion. There's danger in definitions, danger 
that we pigeonhole the thing defined in- 

1 1 need hardly say that I do not consider Hebrews 
the work of Paul. But, even so, the words, " Now 
faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evi- 
dence of things not seen " (Hebrews 11: 1), are not a 
definition and were not so intended. 



152 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

stead of practicing it. Whatever faith may 
be in its last analysis, if it remain only a 
creed with us, it is not faith in the Pauline 
sense. It must be a habit of mind, the very 
air that we breathe, if we are to rise to the 
height of the Apostle's argument. We may 
have moments of doubt — as we gasp at 
times for breath — but the sense of emptiness 
and loss that these moments bring is but 
added evidence that faith is native to our 
nature. 

Do you remember that fine thought in 
William James's essay, Is Life Worth Living? 
" That our whole physical life may lie soak- 
ing in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of 
Being that we at present have no organ for 
apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by 
the analogy of the life of our domestic 
animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our 
human life but not of it. They witness 
hourly the outward body of events whose 
inner meaning cannot, by any possible 
operation, be revealed to their intelligence, 
events in which they themselves often play 
the cardinal part. My terrier bites a teasing 
boy, for example, and the father demands 
damages. The dog may be present at every 
step of the negotiations, and see the money 
paid without an inkling of what it all means, 



THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS 153 

without a suspicion that it has anything to 
do with him. And he never can know in his 
natural dog's life. Or take another case 
which used greatly to impress me in my 
medical-student days. Consider a poor dog 
whom they are vivisecting in the laboratory. 
He lies strapped on a board and shrieking at 
his executioners, and to his own dark con- 
sciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He 
cannot see a single redeeming ray in the 
whole business; and yet all these diabolical- 
seeming events are usually controlled by 
human intentions with which, if his poor, 
benighted mind could only be made to catch 
a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him 
would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, 
relief to future sufferings of beast and man 
are to be bought by them. It is genuinely 
a process of redemption. Lying on his back 
on the board there he is performing a func- 
tion incalculably higher than any prosper- 
ous canine life admits of; and yet, of the 
whole performance, this function is the one 
portion that must remain absolutely beyond 
his ken." 

" In the dog's life," adds Professor 
James, "we see the world invisible to him 
because we live in both worlds. In human 
life, although we only see our world, and his 



154 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

within it, yet encompassing both these 
worlds a still wider world may be there as 
unseen by us as our world is by him ; and to 
believe in that world may be the most essen- 
tial function that our lives in this world 
have to perform. ,, But the analogy of the 
mole seems to me even more suggestive. 
Does he know that above his sunless gal- 
leries there is a world of avenued beauty to 
which his dim pathways are but as acorn to 
oak? All that he could say would be: "I 
live in darkness and am thwarted in my 
efforts to build and to move by great, 
wide-spreading roots. These tend upward. 
Whether they issue in beauty and symmetry 
and service above, I do not know and can 
never know. But they point upward, al- 
ways upward." Is not that a sort of replica 
of our life? We, too, live in darkness but 
in every hard buffeting we seem to touch 
things that point upward, always upward. 
There is a surface beyond which we cannot 
pass. But faith and hope and love, our 
ministrants of widest vision, say: " There is, 
there must be something completer beyond. 
All here is beginning and fragment. Be- 
yond the veil we catch glimpses of the end 
which the beginning implies, gleams of the 
whole which the fragment proclaims." 



THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 155 

III 
But if Paul does not define faith he ex- 
pounds it. " Ye shall know them by their 
fruits," said Christ, of the false prophets. 
And of faith Paul seems to say : " Ye shall 
know it, too, by its fruits." The first fruit 
was freedom from the bondage of law. 
The law remained but it no longer chafed. 
Paul willed what it willed. To its " Thou 
shalt not " he could now reply ' I don't 
want to." He had at last found in law not 
repression but expression. From the servi- 
tude of a slave hearkening to the command 
of his master, he had passed to the freedom 
of a son hearing the voice of his father. 
Paul does not often repeat himself but this 
new sense of filial freedom could not be dis- 
missed in a single passage. In Galatians 
(4 : 4-7) he had written : " But when the 
fulness of the time was come, God, sent 
forth his Son, made of a woman, made un- 
der the law, to redeem them that were un- 
der the law, that we might receive the adop- 
tion of sons. And because ye are sons, God 
hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into 
your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Where- 
fore thou art no more a servant, but a son ; 
and if a son, then an heir of God through 
Christ." In Romans (8:14-17) the same 



156 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

thought is touched with new beauty : " For 
as many as are led by the Spirit of God, 
they are the sons of God. For ye have not 
received the spirit of bondage again to fear; 
but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, 
whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit 
itself beareth witness with our spirit, that 
we are the children of God: and if children, 
then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs 
with Christ ; if so be that we suffer with him, 
that we may be also glorified together." 

The weakness of the law was that it 
weighed, but did not increase weight. It 
was a mirror but not a magnet. It graded 
the pupil but did not train him. A story 
will illustrate: A colored man of the old 
school had been sent by his employer to a 
hospital to recover from fever. The experi- 
ence was new to him but he was grateful 
for every attention shown him and ascribed 
good intentions even where he could see no 
appreciable results. " Do they give you 
enough to eat, Uncle Ned? " asked his em- 
ployer, who called daily to inquire about the 
patient's progress. " Not much, suh," was 
the reply. " But I ain't complainm'. Dey 
gives me a piece o' glass to suck three times 
a day. I don't seem to git much satisfac- 
tion out'n it but de doctor say I'm gittin' 



THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 157 

better." Paul had made the same mistake. 
He had tried to find spiritual nourishment 
in the law, whereas the law is more a ther- 
mometer than a diet. It records mercilessly 
our alternations of moral sickness and health 
but it does not drive out sickness and sub- 
stitute health. The Epistle to the Romans is 
the protest of a man who had been holding 
a thermometer in his mouth and thinking it 
was food. Had the mistake been peculiar 
to St. Paul, the protest would have availed 
little. But it was not peculiar to him. The 
nation, the age, the legal experts themselves, 
those who obeyed and those who disobeyed 
the law were suffering from the same con- 
fusion of ideas. Not only so but the tend- 
ency to the same kind of inversion can be 
traced wherever laws are promulgated. 
Why is the tendency less to-day than then? 
Because the Epistle to the Romans was written 
and written by Paul, trained in " the law of 
the fathers " but emancipated by Christ. 

Emerson touches on the principle at issue 
in his lines about the chickadee. How 
could this scrap of a bird defy the winter 
cold while Emerson shivered in coat and 
overcoat? The bird sings the answer : 

And polar frost my frame defied, 
Made of the air that blows outside. 



158 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

Neither man nor bird nor beast can be 
chilled if the body be made of the air that 
surrounds it. To suffer from cold is but to 
proclaim a steep difference between the 
temperature within and the temperature 
without. Make the temperatures the same, 
normalize them by the same standard, let 
the body that suffers and the air that im- 
poses the suffering be parts of one structural 
whole, and you are equally protected from 
polar cold and tropic heat. The donning or 
doffing of clothes may mitigate the sense of 
discomfort; it cannot expel it. When the 
spirit of the law becomes the spirit of him 
who strives to obey it, when " God hath sent 
forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts/' 
{freedom has been won. Emerson learned 
the physical principle one snow-laden after- 
noon " as I waded through the woods to my 
grove." Paul learned the spiritual prin- 
ciple as he journeyed to Damascus. 

But with freedom from the bondage of 
law faith bestowed also a sense of instant 
acquittal. However fair his record had been 
as a keeper of the law, Paul had drawn a 
lengthening chain of self-condemnation. 
He could not perfectly obey, but to fail by a 
hairbreadth was to feel the full weight of 
the law's violation. Nor was there any 



THE EPISTLE TO THE KOMANS 159 

escape. The law would not bend. Obedi- 
ence heaped upon obedience left him still 
conscious of a chasm that spelled guilt. 
And not only he but all had sinned. "All," 
said Arnold, " is in some sense the govern- 
ing word of the Epistle to the Romans. 11 It is 
the governing word only of that part of the 
Epistle that affirms the universality of 
conscious sin and the corresponding univer- 
sality of the forgiveness that faith imparts. 
"What then? Are we better than they? 
No, in no wise : for we have before proved 
both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all 
under sin. As it is written, There is none 
righteous, no, not one. There is none that 
understandeth, there is none that seeketh 
after God. They are all gone out of the 
way" (3:9-12). "For there is no differ- 
ence between the Jew and the Greek: for 
the same Lord over all is rich unto all that 
call upon him. For whosoever shall call 
upon the name of the Lord shall be saved " 
(10:12-13). 

Gladstone deplored what he thought was 
a waning sense of sin in modern life. I 
cannot help doubting whether the sense of 
sin is actually lessening. It is receding; it 
is passing lower beneath the surface; it is 
diving, I think, rather than diminishing. 



160 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

Every great crisis brings it to the front. 
" Lest we forget " was the only note struck 
at the great Jubilee that found instant and 
universal response; it is the only note that 
still echoes from the diapason of national 
acclaim that closed the triumphs of sixty 
years : 

For heathen heart that puts her trust 
In reeking tube and iron shard, 

All valiant dust that builds on dust, 
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, 

For frantic boast and foolish word — 

Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord ! 

The World War has just drawn to an end 
and right has triumphed gloriously. No one 
can read the thrilling tidings that pour in 
from the Allied Nations without being pro- 
foundly moved by the absence of " frantic 
boast and foolish word." No, when deep 
calleth unto deep, whether in joy or sorrow, 
the Apostle's appeal is vindicated. There 
is in man a latent sense of guilt before his 
Maker. Does not every great preacher, 
whether Protestant, Jew, or Catholic, pre- 
suppose it? Does he not strike for it and 
find it? Is not every wide-reaching revival 
built upon it? Does not every national 
crisis lay it bare? 



THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS 161 

When Paul speaks, therefore, of justifica- 
tion he is not appealing to a consciousness 
of guilt felt only by the Jew, trained in a 
system and ceremonial designed to keep 
alive a racial sensitiveness to wrong-doing. 
He is appealing to a consciousness co- 
extensive with humanity. When he exalts 
faith as the solvent of the sense of guilt, he 
is not merely outlining a central doctrine 
of the New Testament, nor is he recording 
merely a personal experience. He is 
epitomizing the whole history of Christi- 
anity. " Therefore being justified by faith, 
we have peace with God through our Lord 
Jesus Christ : by whom also we have access 
by faith into this grace wherein we stand, 
and rejoice in hope of the glory of God " 
(5:1-2). 

"And not only so, but we glory in tribula- 
tions also : knowing that tribulation worketh 
patience; and patience, experience; and ex- 
perience, hope; and hope maketh not 
ashamed; because the love of God is shed 
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost 
which is given unto us" (5:3-5). I have 
separated this glowing passage into two 
parts because each part proclaims a separate 
victory of faith. Verses 1-2 are the final 
summary of faith as instant acquittal; 



162 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

verses 3-5 pass from justification to sancti- 
fication, from instant acquittal to increas- 
ing attainment. The one offers pardon, the 
other progress ; the one is the gift of grace, 
the other the promise of growth; the one 
says, " You are free from," the other, " You 
are free to; " the one assures the remission 
of sin, the other the remoulding of the 
sinner. Christ had become the pinnacle of 
the Apostle's effort. Instead of adding 
painfully year by year this law and that law 
to the number that he might fairly be said to 
have obeyed, he finds himself counting his 
spiritual progress not by increasing obedi- 
ence to law but by increasing identification 
with Christ. For addition from without 
there was substituted growth from within. 
The journey to Damascus not only rescued 
Paul from drowning; it taught him how to 
swim. 

A man may be saved without sanctifica- 
tion. The thief on the Cross was justified 
into Paradise but he was barred by death 
from the continuing process that we call 
sanctification. Where there is life, how- 
ever, there will be sanctification if justifica- 
tion has preceded. Justification removes 
the weight and gives play to the spiritual 
forces that are already pushing upward. 



THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 163 

The great passage in which Paul combines 
the functions of the two shows how closely 
they were related in his own experience. 
The history of Christianity has only con- 
firmed this relationship. "And not only so " 
remains now as then the brief reach from 
the one to the other. 

Coleridge, who called Romans " the pro- 
foundest work in existence," seems to me to 
have illustrated the twin processes of justi- 
fication and sanctification in his Rime of the 
Ancient Mariner. The mariner had com- 
mitted a wanton sin in killing the innocent 
albatross. As a symbol of his guilt the dead 
bird is hung about his neck. When salva- 
tion comes 

/ 

The albatross fell of, and sank 
Like lead into the sea. 

That was justification. " Thou wilt cast all 
their sins into the depths of the sea" 
(Micah 7:19). Now comes the new life 
with its steady climb to the new ideal. Love 
is to be its pilot, prayer its staff : 

Farewell, farewell ! but this I tell 
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest ! 
He prayeth well, who loveth well 
Both man and bird and beast. 



164 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

He prayeth best, who loveth best 
All things both great and small ; 
For the dear God who loveth us, 
He made and loveth all. 

That is sanctification. 

IV 
Faith as seen in its three fruits, emanci- 
pajion^ justification^ sanctification, — this is 
the theme of the Epistle to the Romans. The 
picture is sketched against the background 
of the Mosaic law, and the colors are drawn 
from the Apostle's own vivid and transform- 
ing experience. Had there been no journey 
to Damascus, there would have been no 
Epistle to the Romans. Luke narrates the 
journey as history {Acts 9:1-31), but to 
Paul it was autobiography. The outer facts 
are the units in Luke's story; the inner 
transformations are the stages in Paul's 
survey. Faith is a rare word in the Old 
Testament. It is found in Romans more 
often than in the Old Testament and the 
four Gospels combined. But though the 
word is rare before the coming of Christ, 
the thing itself is wrought into the inmost 
texture of God's dealings with man. The 
first soul that found its way to God found 
it by faith, and the last will find it where the 



THE EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS 165 

first found it. But it is to Paul that we owe 
the new vision. It was he that made clear 
to human intelligence the oneness of out- 
look that links Abraham not only with the 
spiritual heroes of the New Testament but 
with your neighbor or mine who on yester- 
day or to-day passed with a smile from home 
or battle-field into the presence of his God. 
The Epistle to the Romans has made the road 
to Damascus the highway of Christendom. 




VIII 

THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 

i 
^HIS brief letter stands in a class 
by itself. Paul's other letters to 
churches are doctrinal ; this is per- 
sonal. If the Bpistle to the Romans is the ex- 
pression of Paul's intellect at its highest 
reach, the Epistle to the Philip plans is the ex- 
pression of his temperament at its normal 
level. It is the overflow of the Apostle's 
heart to the first church that he founded in 
Europe. There is no censure; there is only 
praise for their steadfastness and gratitude 
for their generosity. No dominant theme 
compels the thought, for the Apostle's mood 
is reflective, not argumentative. This letter 
is Paul in study robe and slippers. 
j / It is also by common consent the last 
X/^f*trfi /^letter that Paul wrote. Death fronts him 
or rather he fronts death. The prison walls 
are about him but, though they shut in his 

166 



THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 167 

body, they seem only a challenge to his 
spirit. His mind passes in review the inci- 
dents of other days, the happy associations 
that bind him to his fellow-workers, and the 
seeming misfortunes that have all " fallen 
out rather unto the furtherance of the Gos- 
pel." Most interesting of all, however, and 
most revealing, are the tested truths which 
he is not now planting but harvesting. 
Like Emerson's Terminus, Longfellow's 
Morituri Salutamus, Browning's Epilogue to 
Asolando, and Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, 
this is Paul's valedictory, his swan song. 
It is not formal and studied, its message 
seeming to be overheard rather than heard. 
He is reviewing and reappraising in quiet- 
ness and serenity what before he advo- 
cated or defended with Pauline ardor and 
intensity. 

Remember that this is the first time in the 
history of the new faith that a follower of 
the crucified Christ is permitted to view the 
approach of death at close quarters and to 
report calmly on the result. The first martyr 
had said (Acts 7:56): "Behold, I see the 
heavens opened and the Son of man stand- 
ing on the right hand of God," and Paul 
had doubtless heard him. But Stephen's 
words are more a hail to the life beyond 



168 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

than a farewell to this. If the last hours of 
other New Testament martyrs had been re- 
corded for us, I do not doubt that we should 
have had other testimonies to group with 
the Epistle to the Philippians. But Paul's fare- 
well alone remains, and this gives to Philip- 
pians a kind of significance not shared by 
any other book of the New Testament. 

The words of men as they face into the 
unknown have always been invested with a 
peculiar authoritativeness. For my own 
part the assertions of innocence that con- 
demned men so often make just before the 
end weigh more in my final estimate than 
the most detailed arguments of the prosecu- 
tion. Shakespeare makes the dying John of 
Gaunt give the reason: 

O, but they say the tongues of dying men 
Enforce attention like deep harmony. 
Where words are scarce, they're seldom spent 

in vain, 
For they breathe truth that breathe their 

words in pain. 
He that no more must say is listen'd more 
Than they whom youth and ease have taught 

to glose. 
More are men's ends mark'd than their lives 

before. 

Poe in Tamerlane adds a further reason : 



THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 169 

Father, I firmly do believe — 

I know — for Death who comes for me 

From regions of the blest afar, 

Where there is nothing to deceive, 

Hath left his iron gate ajar, 

And rays of truth you cannot see 

Are flashing through Eternity. 

Montaigne believed that the only way to 
judge a man's life was to review it from 
death backward: "Wherefore at this last 
action all the other actions of our life ought 
to be tried and sifted. J Tis the masterday ; 
'tis the day that is judge of all the rest; 'tis 
the day that ought to be judge of all my 
foregoing years. ... In the judgment 
I make of another man's life, I always ob- 
serve how he carried himself at his death." * 

II 
We are not left in doubt as to how Paul 
" carried himself." Though we do not see 
him at the last moment we hear him say 
just before the shadow falls : " For me to 
live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I 
live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labor : 
yet what I shall choose I wot not. For I 
am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire 

1 See the essay entitled " That Men are not to 
Judge of our Happiness till after Death." 



170 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

to depart, and to be with Christ; which is 
far better. Nevertheless to abide in the flesh 
is more needful for you " (1 : 21-24). Ham- 
let was also " in a strait betwixt two " but 
the question is settled in favor of life, not 
that " to abide in the flesh is more needful " 
for any one else, 

But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn 
No traveller returns, puzzles the will 
And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of. 
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. 

No, conscience does not make cowards of 
us all. Death had been faced bravely, even 
fearlessly, before the coming of Christ. In 
pagan lands men and women have risen 
superior to it, have even dared it. But 
these were rare souls. All honor to them ! 
Christianity did not inaugurate fearlessness 
of death but it made common stock of it 
where before it was preferred stock. It 
enabled your obscure neighbor and mine to 
die with all the calmness of Socrates and 
Marcus Aurelius and with twice the con- 
fidence that all is well. It robbed death of 
its tyranny of the vague. Death became 
only going home. The ship was not ven- 



THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 171 

turing into an unknown sea; it was only 
anchoring in its destined harbor. 

Death is not now viewed as the terrible 
but inevitable engulfment of life. It is a 
consummation innate in the larger view of 
life. If life is probation, as the first book of 
the Bible proclaims, if it is the race-track of 
the developing spirit, death is coronation 
and goal. The lines of life do not dip down 
to death; they converge upward to it. 
Christianity has changed our attitude to 
death because it has changed our concep- 
tion of life. Even where there is no open 
or acknowledged faith in Christ, Christi- 
anity has so diffused the larger view of life 
and so enthroned the thought of an all-em- 
bracing mercy that death has ceased to be 
but another name for gruesome terror. 
But, whether recognized or not, it is Christ 
that took the sting from death and the vic- 
tory from the grave. His revelation of life 
made death a portal instead of a portent. 
Paul sums up the twin thought when he 
says : " For me to live is Christ, and to die 
is gain." The Christ life not only dissolves 
the fear of death; it crystallizes it into the 
certainty of something better. 

But Paul's thoughts are not all nor even 
chiefly of death. The life that abolishes the 



172 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

fear of death is always primal in his think- 
ing. Every epistle that he wrote traverses 
somewhere the larger thought of life. But 
I wish to consider now a quality in Paul's 
writings which seems to have been over- 
looked by his biographers but which is as 
truly autobiographic as any event or doc- 
trine associated with his name. I mean his 
equal mastery of what we loosely call prose 
and poetry. More accurately it is the 
combination in his personality of two 
powers, each the beneficiary of the other. 
•Paul is usually thought of as a great logician, 
one whose mind played quickly over wide 
areas of truth, found unity in apparent 
diversity, and summarized the results in 
terms of cubic measure rather than in those 
of linear or square measure. So he was; 
but if one lobe of his brain was logic the 
other was song. He can take a word like 
charity and literally sing its content into 
the consciousness of the world. If the 
thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians alone re- 
mained to us of his writings, I should have 
said that at his death the greatest lyric poet 
of his day passed from among men. There 
is no hidden recess of charity that is not 
sung out into the light as by one to whom 
prose was an awkward tool and poetry the 



THE EPISTLE TO THE PHIUPPIANS 173 

native utterance. His singing robes are on 
him again as he chants the separate glories 
of bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial 
(1 Corinthians 15:40-57). 

But every passage that lingers in the 
memory for the poetic beauty of its content 
or robing might be expunged, and Paul's 
mastery of thought and expression could be 
solidly established on the basis of his rigid 
reasoning and penetrating analysis. His 
normal gait indeed is prose, not poetry. 
The difference, it seems to me, is due to a 
difference of direction. In his most closely 
knit prose he moves downward, from the 
greater to the less ; in the passages that be- 
speak the poet he moves upward, from the 
less to the greater. Read again the birth 
chant of Christian charity ; note the pinnacle 
ending: "And now abideth faith, hope, 
charity, these three; but the greatest of 
these is charity" (1 Corinthians 13:13). 
Listen again to the solemn music of the 
passage beginning: "There are also celestial 
bodies, and bodies terrestrial : but the glory 
of the celestial is one, and the glory of the 
terrestrial is another " (1 Corinthians 15 :40) ; 
note how the thought and the music bour- 
geon out together in the final paean of vic- 
tory: "O death, where is thy sting? O 



174 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

grave, where is thy victory? The sting of 
death is sin; and the strength of sin is the 
law. But thanks be to God which giveth us 
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 

Read now the warrior passage in Ephe- 
sians (6: 13-17). This is not poetry but it 
is masterly prose. It begins with " the 
whole armor of God " and ends with " the 
sword of the Spirit." It passes downward 
from an armory to a single piece of armor. 
Had Paul begun with " the sword of the 
Spirit " and moved upward and outward to 
" the whole armor of God," his phrasing 
would have been different. The same 
weapons and the same functions might have 
been mentioned but the characterizations 
would have been cumulative in beauty and 
vividness, for his poetic manner would have 
replaced his prose manner. 

Nowhere are the two movements more 
clearly illustrated than in Philippians 2 : 5-11 : 
" Let this mind be in you which was also 
in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of 
God, thought it not robbery to be equal 
with God: but made himself of no reputa- 
tion, and took upon him the form of a serv- 
ant, and was made in the likeness of men : 
and being found in fashion as a man, he 
humbled himself and became obedient unto 



THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 175 

death, even the death of the cross. Where- 
fore God also hath highly exalted him, and 
given him a name which is above every 
name : that at the name of Jesus every knee 
should bow, of things in heaven, and things 
in earth, and things under the earth ; and that 
every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ 
is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." Be- 
tween Christ " in the form of God " to Christ 
suffering " the death of the cross " there is 
compressed in logical and well ordered prose 
the entire teaching of the New Testament. 
It is a biography of Christ compressed into 
a sentence, and into the biography is woven 
the central teaching of Christ's life. The 
movement is downward, and the thinker in 
Paul predominates. But at " Wherefore " 
the movement is upward from Christ on the 
Cross to Christ on the throne of the uni- 
verse, and the seer in Paul speaks. 

Browning, too, was thinker and seer. 
But in later years the prose manner of the 
thinker so invaded the vision of the seer 
that nearly one-half of his work, that written 
after 1870, added little if anything to his 
reputation. But Philippians shows that Paul 
retained his dualism of endowment to the 
end. The passage quoted not only sum- 
marizes the Christ that was and the Christ 



176 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

that is to be ; it conjoins also the two Pauls. 
To know this man you must not only enter 
the doorways of his intellect; you must look 
through the windows of his spirit. No 
biography of him is worth while that 
neglects to indicate this double endowment 
or fails to trace the deepened inflow and 
outflow of truth that resulted therefrom. 

But Philippians shows still another angle 
from which to view the personality of its 
author. Consider for a moment the vast 
significance of these words : " Brethren, I 
count not myself to have apprehended : but 
this one thing I do, forgetting those things 
which are behind, and reaching forth unto 
^those things which are before, I press toward 
the mark for the prize of the high calling 
of God in Christ Jesus " (3 : 13-14). That 
passage seems to me to give vitality and 
boundlessness to every doctrine that Paul 
has championed. Had he reported differ- 
ently, had he counted himself as having ap- 
prehended, I for one should have felt that 
power had gone forever from every page of 
his writings. The man who feels that he 
has caught up with his ideal compels me to 
believe that his ideal was a very poor sort 
of thing after all. I thought it was a ladder 
with its summit in the skies. But he proves 



THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 177 

that it was only a rocking-chair. Passage 
after passage of St. Paul would have to be 
reinterpreted and put on a lower plane of 
appeal if he had proclaimed himself as 
sitting astride the goal. Writings that I 
had thought belonged to the literature of 
power would now have to be classed as be- 
longing only to the literature of knowledge ; 
appeals that seemed to release limitless 
energy of pursuit would have their push and 
urge taken out of them; tracts of effort 
where the " no fence law " seemed to hold 
would now be revealed as divided and 
hemmed in; waters that I thought had the 
tang and challenge of the ocean would now 
smack of the bounded lake or stagnant pool. 
Paul must have known that his confession 
might be used against him. I have no doubt 
that it was. The finished and finite clods of 
his day, the legalists whom he had fought 
on this very issue, must have read in his 
words a confession of defeat for himself and 
of weakness for the system that he repre- 
sented. But his frank admission needs no 
defense now. Sir Joshua Reynolds defined 
his own ideal thus : " The sight never be- 
held it, nor has the hand expressed it; it is 
an idea residing in the breast of the artist 
which he is always laboring to impart and 



178 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

which he dies at last without imparting." 
If this is true of the artist it is doubly true 
of the man who is attempting to mould 
character. Christianity is built on an un- 
attainable ideal. When Paul said, " I count 
not myself to have apprehended," he did 
more than prove his own greatness of soul; 
he touched with a certain endlessness every 
letter that he had written. He made self- 
gratulation and smug complacency forever 
aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and 
strangers from the covenants of promise. 

Ill 
Bruno Bauer found the Epistle to the Philip- 
pians characterized by " a monotonous 
repetition of what had already been said, 
by a want of any deep and masterly con- 
nection of ideas, and by a certain poverty 
of thought." This is a kind of criticism of 
which we are to hear far less in the future. 
Strange that it has masqueraded so long as 
scholarly and illuminating. Are good-bye 
letters to be weighed in the same scales with 
arguments and orations? Was Paul noth- 
ing but a controversialist? After rearing the 
pillars of the vast structure that we call 
Christian thought, could he not sit for a 
moment within its walls and review the 



THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 179 

work of his hand? Had he no personality? 
Is not his survey of what he had tried to be 
and do of priceless value in appraising the 
man that stood behind the disputant? 

Let us put over against Bauer's inane 
comment a recent cablegram from Paris: 
" One gratefully appreciated service done 
by the workers of the Y. M. C. A. in France 
is to bring relatives to the bedsides of dying 
or fatally wounded soldiers/' Paul was not 
dying, nor was he fatally wounded. But he 
was in the shadow of death and he knew it. 
This letter and this letter alone is the pass- 
port to his presence. 




IX 

REVELATION 

I 
O book of the Bible seems to me to 
possess as much unreleased power 
as the book of Revelation. Written 
at a time when the struggling churches were 
ringed around with enemies, when the 
Roman Empire had leagued itself against 
them, when the future seemed impenetrably 
dark, this book sounds a note of confidence 
so resonant and dauntless that the victory 
seemed already half won. It is more than 
a piece of writing; it belongs rather to the 
realm of deed. It is not so much a trumpet 
calling to battle for right as a sword un- 
sheathed till right be won. Handicapped 
though it has been by perverse interpreta- 
tion it has done more than any other one 
book to halt the old idea that the Golden 
Age is behind us. When this book was 
written all the great world literatures had 
represented history as only a steep descent 
from good through bad to worst. From 

180 



EEVELATION 181 

Hesiod to Virgil there is hardly a Greek or 
Roman poet who does not look longingly 
back to the remote age of painlessness and 
peace; there is hardly one who does not 
bewail his own fate in being born into the 
Iron Age of unrequited labor and unattain- 
able hope. There was no forward view. 
Virgil tried for a moment to check the 
despair of his age by proclaiming a second 
Golden Age. But by the time the sEneid 
was written he too had succumbed to the 
national depression and instead of another 
Golden Age he can only hope for a reign of 
comparative peace. 

As long as the sun is in front of us the 
shadows fall behind, but when the sun is 
behind us the shadows loom before. It is 
in the light of this truth that we must try to 
evaluate the service of Revelation, It placed 
a new heaven and a new earth far in front, 
as something yet to be; it substituted pros- 
pect for retrospect; it sent out a call to the 
spiritual forces of the world to mobilize for 
a vast constructive and reconstructive ef- 
fort; it lifted men's minds to a vision of 

That God, which ever lives and loves, 
One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event, 

To which the whole creation moves. 



182 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

But there is still unreleased power in the 
book; it is still functioning below its maxi- 
mum, because it has fallen upon a time when 
men eddy around its minor obscurities in- 
stead of moving with its great marching 
current. Did you never make the height 
bear the burden of the plane? Did you 
never call upon the future to lift you over 
the present? "What I do thou knowest 
not now, but thou shalt know hereafter." 
The Christian's hereafter has ever been 
physician to his now. 

Yesterday and to-day 

Have been heavy with labor and sorrow, 
I should faint if I did not see 

The day that is after to-morrow. 

Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson writes from 
the horror of the trenches to his father, the 
author of these lines, and adds: "There's 
that last verse of your poem which prophe- 
sied utterly the spirit in which we men at 
the Front are fighting to-day." That last 
verse is: 

And for me, with spirit elate 

The mire and the fog I press through, 

For Heaven shines under the cloud 
Of the day that is after to-morrow. 

That is a glimpse of the height at which 



EEVELATION 183 

Revelation moves; it is a wafture from the 
airs that one must breathe who essays to 
traverse these uplands of St. John. Reve- 
lation is the Christian epic of " the day that 
is after to-morrow." In its pages one may 
hear voices that will sound forever in his 
ears and see far-moving lights that will play 
forever about his feet as he presses pain- 
fully, it may be, but confidently upward. 

The commentators, however, view the 
book otherwise. Its swift-flowing central 
current has been so stayed and deflected by 
them as to be hardly discernible in their 
pages. Like the book of Jonah, the book of 
Revelation has suffered much from piecemeal 
interpretation. Take the words " a thou- 
sand years " which occur in the first part of 
the twentieth chapter. If the reader has 
felt even for a moment the tense elevation 
of mood at which these words were written 
he will not be tempted to construe them as 
meaning exactly ten hundred. When the 
author of Daniel, lifted to an equal elevation, 
cried out: "Ten thousand times ten thou- 
sand stood before him " (7 : 10), no one feels 
inclined to stop and calculate the exact 
product indicated. When Peter asked Christ 
whether he should forgive an offending 
brother seven times, the reply was: "I say 



184 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

not unto thee, Until seven times : but, Until 
seventy times seven" (Matthew 18:22). 
But does any one contend that the Master 
meant just four hundred and ninety? In 
the book of Revelation, however, the " thou- 
sand years " has divided critics into warring 
camps ; it has thrust into our language such 
strange words as " chiliasm " and " chiliast," 
"premillennialist " and "postmillennialism," 
not one of which has a right to be alive. 
And, worse still, the disproportionate 
amount of thought and space given to the 
phrase leaves none for the larger dynamic 
message that the book proclaims. 

Now whatever else you bring to the won- 
derful book that so fitly closes the canon of 
Scripture — and none other could close it — 
do not bring this kind of servile literalism. 
It will seal every passage for you as with 
the Apostle's own seven seals. Bring every 
ounce of vision, of pictorial faculty, of in- 
terpretative and constructive imagination 
that you possess. The result will be a per- 
manent addition to faith and hope as well as 
to that exaltation of spirit in which both 
faith and hope find their coronation. 

II 

Revelation shows peculiar care in its struc- 



KEVELATION 185 

tttral divisions. Let us call these the 
Church Hesitant (chapters 1-3), the Church 
Militant (chapters 4-20), and the Church 
Triumphant (chapters 21-22). The seven 
churches addressed in the first division — 
Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, 
Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea — stand 
of course for all of the churches then 
founded that had Christ " in the midst " 
(1:13). The number seven gave the He- 
brew writer an instrument of peculiar 
power. It enabled him to symbolize not 
only completeness in number but complete- 
ness in excellence. It means here not only 
all the churches that had Christ in them but 
also the best in each. Its connotation was 
quantitative and qualitative, extensive and 
intensive. The churches, however, are not 
merely forewarned that a long period of 
struggle is before them. These first three 
chapters, in fact, contain but little warning 
and but little formal announcement. They 
constitute a commission. A new era in 
world history is dawning, an era unlike any 
that has gone before. The church is be- 
ginning its organized career. Hitherto its 
efforts have been scattered and unrelated. 
Now they are to be massed and integrated. 
Like seven golden candlesticks, the seven 



186 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

churches point upward and burn as with 
one light. Above all, Christ is " in the 
midst/' But the opposition is organized 
also and on a far vaster scale than the 
churches. No wonder there was hesitation 
and even blank dismay. 

But the churches are not to be spectators; 
they are not to be merely one of the con- 
testants for right. They are the only con- 
testants for right. They constitute all of 
one side in the conflict. The destiny of the 
world is with them because with Christ " in 
the midst " they are the sole commissioned 
defenders of the things that Christ's pres- 
ence confers. We speak of history as the 
conflict of individualism and institutional- 
ism, of democracy and autocracy, of ideal- 
ism and materialism ; and the saying is true, 
in a way. But, according to St. John, there 
is a more elemental dualism than any of 
these. See deep enough and you will see 
right on one side and wrong on the other. 

Lowell sums it up : 

History's pages but record 
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old 

systems and the Word ; 
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong for- 
ever on the throne, — 



EEVELATION 187 

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind 

the dim unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping 

watch above His own. 

" History is philosophy teaching by ex- 
amples/' said Bolingbroke. " Not so," 
says St. John ; " history is now going to be 
Christ in the church subduing the world 
unto himself." The churches are to con- 
stitute the sole partnership of right. They 
are to make history by protecting it from 
the forces that would unmake it. There is 
a striking analogy between St. John's 
thought and that of President Wilson in 
his Manchester speech of December 30, 
1918: "It is a fine correlation of the influ- 
ence of duty and right," he said, " that right 
is the equipoise and balance of society. 
And so, when we analyze the present situa- 
tion and the future that we now have to 
mold and control, it seems to me that there 
is no other thought than that that can guide 
us." Both, you will notice, stood at the part- 
ing of the ways; both were seeking what 
was permanent and constructive; and both 
found in right the sole clue to the maze that 
encompassed them. 

To regard this portion of Revelation as a 
mere announcement to interested spectators 



188 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

is to miss the challenge of the whole book. 
It is the church that is to do the fighting. 
It is the fighting itself that is to constitute 
the second and longest division of the book. 
It is the ultimate victory issuing in a new 
and redeemed world that is to form the 
culminating vision with which the Bible 
ends. The noise of battle can be already 
heard in the solemn promises that are made 
to each church. To the church in Ephesus : 
' To him that overcometh will I give to eat 
of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the 
paradise of God" (2:7); to the church in 
Smyrna : " He that overcometh shall not be 
hurt of the second death" (2:11); to the 
church in Pergamos : " To him that over- 
cometh will I give to eat of the hidden 
manna, and will give him a white stone, and 
in the stone a new name written, which no 
man knoweth saving he that receiveth it " 
(2 : 17) ; to the church in Thyatira: "And he 
that overcometh, and keepeth my words 
unto the end, to him will I give power over 
the nations " (2: 26) ; to the church in Sar- 
dis : " He that overcometh, the same shall 
be clothed in white raiment; and I will not 
blot out his name out of the book of life, 
but I will confess his name before my 
Father, and before his angels " (3:5); to 



REVELATION 189 

the church in Philadelphia : " Him that over- 
cometh will I make a pillar in the temple of 
my God, and he shall go no more out : and I 
will write upon him the name of my God, 
and the name of the city of my God, which 
is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out 
of heaven from my God: and I will write 
upon him my new name " (3 : 12) ; and to 
the church in Laodicea : " To him that 
overcometh will I grant to sit with me in 
my throne, even as I also overcame, and 
am set down with my Father in his throne ,! 
(3:22). 

Ill 
"After this I looked, and, behold, a door 
was opened in heaven: and the first voice 
which I heard was as it were of a trumpet 
talking with me; which said, Come up 
hither, and I will shew thee things which 
must be hereafter" (4:1). Thus begins 
the vision of the Church Militant. The 
battle is on now, and though we see through 
a glass darkly, we at least see. Do we not 
feel, too, and feel all the more vividly be- 
cause of the semi-darkness that is about us? 
The Apostle is sketching in broad and 
dramatic outline the interim between his 
time and that yet remote period when there 



190 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

shall emerge the new heaven and the new 
earth, — 

There where law, life, joy, impulse are one 
thing. 

The very predominance of the number 
seven seems evidence to me that the seer 
is not attempting to chronicle in advance 
any definite historical facts in history, like 
the rise of the Catholic Church, the invasion 
of the Turks, the havoc of the French Revo- 
lution, and what not. He is dealing with 
types of events under which definite events 
may be grouped, it is true, but as illustra- 
tions rather than as foreseen fulfillments; 
he is dealing with masses of fact fused by 
vision into essential unity ; his eye is not on 
the fact or event in itself but on the genus 
that includes it; he is building compart- 
ments into which facts, events, causes, and 
processes may be fitted as the centuries 
pass. 

There are five of these major compart- 
ments waiting to be occupied and illustrated 
by the unfolding of time. Each compart- 
ment may hold innumerable events, and one 
great event or process may radiate its ef- 
fects into each compartment. (1) The 
seven seals (5: 1-8: 1) typify the revelation 



EEVELATIOST 191 

of vast secrets that the future holds in store ; 
(2) the seven trumpets (8: 2-11: 19) herald 
the announcement of world changes; (3) the 
seven living things (12: 1-13: 18) are types 
of character that on a titanic scale will prove 
formative for good or evil; (4) the seven 
vials of wrath (15:1-16:21) are plagues 
that cause the extinction or modification of 
races and nations; (5) the seven dooms 
(17:1-20:15) are judgments of God cul- 
minating in the final overthrow of evil. 
These five factors do not correspond, it is 
true, to the categories that modern his- 
torians employ. Why should they? St. 
John was not writing history. He was 
glimpsing it. He was prefiguring its essen- 
tial processes. If his method is not that of 
a Macaulay or Stubbs it is strikingly like 
that of a Carlyle or Hugo. 

It is still more like that of the poets. Here 
is Tennyson's Apocalypse. He longs — 

To sleep through terms of mighty wars, 

And wake on science grown to more, 
On secrets of the brain, the stars, 

As wild as aught of fairy lore ; 
And all that else the years will show, 

The Poet- forms of stronger hours, 
The vast Republics that may grow, 

The Federations and the Powers : 



192 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

Titanic forces taking birth 
In divers seasons, divers climes ; 

For we are ancients of the earth, 
And in the morning of the times. 

According to Tennyson the future is to 
witness (1) wars, (2) a crescent science, 
(3) new discoveries in psychology and 
astronomy, (4) nobler forms of poetry, and 
(5) a vast extension of democracy. These 
are the five main compartments which, the 
laureate thought, the coming ages would 
fill, — had indeed already begun to fill before 
he died. If you could congratulate Tenny- 
son on his successful prophecy of the World 
War and on his provision for its effects 
in compartments 1 and 2 and 5, I think that 
his reply would be : " I did not prophesy the 
World War : I only built the compartments 
in which you may house its multiform re- 
sults." And a similar answer would be 
made, I believe, by St. John, if you could 
question him about any of the epochal 
events that he is currently thought to have 
foreseen and foretold even in minute detail. 

Instead, then, of the "futurist" or the 
" preterist " view of Revelation let us try the 
type or compartment view. It alone, I be- 
lieve, will save Revelation to us as a great for- 



REVELATION 193 

ward-looking and forward-propelling vision. 
If John was describing in advance any of 
the great events that we call history, why, 
when you have established the identification 
to your satisfaction, that part of the book 
becomes for you extinct. You may blow 
out the light, for it can serve you no longer ; 
retrospect takes the place of prospect, but 
retrospect has neither the urge nor the 
pulse of prospect. On the other hand, if 
John was describing only past or contempo- 
rary events, he would be getting no nearer 
to his goal at the end. The new heaven 
and the new earth that close his vision would 
have no avenues leading to them. The 
mighty conflicts of the Church Militant 
would be what Carlyle somewhere calls " all 
action and no go." Do not the trumpet 
words placed at the very beginning of this 
section, " I will shew thee things which 
must be hereafter," preclude the preterist 
view? 

And these things will always be " here- 
after." John's symbols face future-ward, 
not backward. Events pass through them 
in the march from future to past, but the 
symbols are not thereby exhausted. Mirrors 
are not worn out by reflecting passing 
pageants. Formulas do not age by use; 



194 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

they vindicate afresh their vitality and their 
service whenever the elements combine in 
right proportions; they, too, face forward, 
ever forward. What was vision to John 
should be vision to us. Make of his vision 
a puzzle of the past and what was meant 
to be a rising sun, rising till it blend with 
the perfect day, becomes a setting sun, 
heralding a deeper darkness. 

" It is this sense of the coming day," says 
Dr. Jowett, " which gives the soul power to 
endure. It is this sense of the future which 
we so much need. Our life is bigger than 
the passing hour. We must relate to-day to 
to-morrow. The sharp, destructive sweeps 
of the plowshare, shearing to the roots of 
ten thousand flowers, must be related to the 
coming golden grain. We must link the 
bare overturned clods with the harvest 
home ! ' We are saved by hope/ Brave, 
consecrated men and women, devoting their 
strength to holy causes, are not moving in 
blind and futile circles ; they are moving on 
God's road to ever-brightening issues. 
' The path of the just is as the shining light 
that shineth more and more unto the per- 
fect day.' It is our wisdom to live and 
move and have our being in the power of 
that glorious expectation." 



EEVELATION 195 

The comfort that this book brings and 
has brought in increasing measure during 
the heavy years that are just passed is due 
to the completeness of the vision that it un- 
folds. All other visions seem but rivulets 
beside it. Beginning with the church as it 
was in John's day, passing in quick review 
the kinds of spiritual struggle that must be 
expected, it ends with a victory so vividly 
foreseen and so satisfyingly phrased that 
the reader gains a new view of the meaning 
of history and a new confidence in the un- 
conquerableness of Christianity. However 
vague or indeterminate the processes are 
that lie between the Church Hesitant and 
the Church Triumphant, God is in them and 
over them. They are struggles between 
essential right and essential wrong and 
Christ is in the midst of His Church. No 
one can read this battle of the symbols with- 
out feeling the onrush of mighty forces con- 
trolled to good and made convergent upon 
one sure goal. The imagery may not be 
Western, it may not be modern; but it is 
universal in its revelation of God over all 
and victory at the end. There is no mis- 
caking it, unless one hold in leash every 
prompting of devotion, every beckoning of 
his spiritual imagination, and bring to 



196 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

bear only his analytical and puzzle-solving 
faculties. 

IV 

Not the trumpets but the flutes play here, 
for the Church Triumphant emerges in still- 
ness, in peace, in joy as uncompassable in 
words as it is unfathomable in depth. As 
the aged Apostle pens the last verses of the 
Bible, his thought turns back to the first 
verse: " In the beginning God created the 
heaven and the earth." Now he writes: 
"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth : 
for the first heaven and the first earth were 
passed away" (21:1). But the sea still 
writhes around him on Patmos Isle and the 
sea is the symbol of death, of suffering, of 
diverse languages, of nations antagonized 
by its dividing waves. The sea is not now 
water to St. John; it is waste and discord: 
"And there was no more sea " (21 : 1). The 
age-long contests of Athens, Rome, and 
Jerusalem are forever past but it was Jeru- 
salem that embodied the immortal life : 
"And I John saw the holy city, new Jeru- 
salem, coming down from God out of 
heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her 
husband. And I heard a great voice out of 
heaven saying, Behold the tabernacle of God 
is with men, and they shall be his people, 



EEVELATION 197 

and God himself shall be with them, and be 
their God. And God shall wipe away all 
tears from their eyes; and there shall be no 
more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, 
neither shall there be any more pain : for the 
former things are passed away" (21:2-4). 
But the temple, — has it not been rebuilt and 
restored? "And I saw no temple therein: 
for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb 
are the temple of it" (21:22). 

Can the author of the Fourth Gospel re- 
main long at this altitude without having 
recourse to light and life, those great words 
whose spiritual service he has almost pre- 
empted? "And the city had no need of the 
sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for 
the glory of God did lighten it, and the 
Lamb is the light thereof " (21 : 23). This 
is the profoundest word on light that the 
Bible contains; having served its ministry 
it is regathered into the orbed splendor of 
which it was but a pilgrim ray. 

But life remains, life quickened, life in- 
tensified, life glorified ; and with the flow of 
the river of life, bordered by the tree of life, 
the Apostle nears the close of his vision : 
"And he shewed me a pure river of water 
of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the 
throne of God and of the Lamb. In the 



198 KEYNOTE STUDIES 

midst of the street of it, and on either side 
of the river, was there the tree of life, which 
bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded 
her fruit every month ; and the leaves of the 
tree were for the healing of the nations. 
And there shall be no more curse: but the 
throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in 
it; and his servants shall serve him: and 
they shall see his face ; and his name shall be 
in their foreheads. And there shall be no 
night there; and they need no candles, 
neither light of the sun; for the Lord God 
giveth them light : and they shall reign for- 
ever and ever " (22 : 1-5). 

With the passing of the sun, Genesis seems 
again to recur. Its central truths were 
creation and probation. But creation has 
been recreated. Has probation also run its 
appointed course? "He that is unjust, let 
him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, 
let him be filthy still: and he that is right- 
eous, let him be righteous still : and he that 
is holy, let him be holy still " (22 : 11). One 
can almost hear the words, " Depart from 
me," words as irrevocable as doom, words 
that in themselves are doom. But no, there 
is time yet. The doors are not closed. 
They are thrown wide open and the vision 
ends not with "Go" but with "Come": 



REVELATION 199 

"And the spirit and the bride say, Come. 
And let him that heareth say, Come. And 
let him that is athirst come. And whoso- 
ever will, let him take the water of life 
freely" (22:17). On this note the Bible 
closes, closes with a promise and a prayer 
by John himself: " He which testifieth these 
things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of 
our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. 
Amen." 



Index of Authors Other than Biblical 



Arnold, M., 39, 148, 159 

Bacon, 46, 79 

Bade, W. F., 31 

Barton, G. A., 96 

Bauer, Bruno, 178 

Bentley, Richard, 47 

Bergson, Henri, 106 

Boeckh, P. A., 41 

Bolingbroke, Viscount, 187 

Bos well, James, 130 

Boyle, Robert, 47 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 121 

Browning, Robert, 88, 99, 124, Hesiod, 181 



Galileo, 46, 47 
Gardner, J. H., 112 
Gibbon, Edward, 16 
Gladstone, W. E., 159 
Goethe, 87 
Gray, Thomas, 21, 22, 24 

Harvey, William, 46, 47 
Hauptmann, G., 27 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 126 
Henderson, Archibald, 125 
Henry, O., 65, 148 
Herodotus, 73 



148, 167, 175 
Burke, Edmund, 97 
Burns, Robert, 24 
Byron, Lord, 105 

Carlyle, Thomas, 88, 148, 

191, 193 

Chateaubriand, 43 
Coleridge, S. T., 89, 163 

Dante, 76 

Dawson, Coningsby, 182 
De Maupassant, 65 
Dickens, Charles, 62 
Dostoyevsky, F. M., 126 
Dunn, W. H., 130 



Homer, 76 
Hooker, Richard, 150 
Hughes, Thomas, 93 
Hugo, Victor, 191 
Huxley, Thomas, 47 

Ibsen, 26 

James, William, 80, 152 
Jefferson, Thomas, 24 
Johnson, C. F., 14 
Johnson, Samuel, 130 
Jowett, J. H., 194 



Kant, 59 

Kent, C. F., 44 

Kepler, 46 
Emerson, R. W., 26, 148, 157, Kipling, Rudyard, 65, 160 

158, 167 
Eucken, Rudolph, 14 Lanier, Sidney, 19, 42 

Lee, Sidney, 130 
Fiske, John, 39 Longfellow, H. W., 21, 167 

Franklin, Benjamin, 64 Lowell, J. R., 186 

Froude, J. A., 88 
Fuller, Thomas, 55 Macaulay, T. B., 191 

201 



202 

Maeterlinck, M., 27 
Markham, Edwin, 17, 125 
Marshall, John, 97 
Milton, John, 21, 90 
Montaigne, 169 
Moore, C. L., 17 
Moulton, R. G., 15 
Muir, J., 44 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 46, 47 



INDEX 

Ruskin, John, 94 

Salisbury, Lord, 106 
Shakespeare, 26, 63, 71, 90, 

168 
Sheldon, Gilbert, 30 
Shelley, P. B., 21 
Smith, J. M. Powis, 29 
Strindberg, August, 125 
Stubbs, William, 191 



Parr, Samuel, 130 

Pierce, Benjamin, 46 

roe, r,. a., 10, 10, 42, 00, 01, T ff R a , 2fi 

65, 79, 168 >tt ' K ' A " ' 

Prescott, W. H., 1 1 



Tennyson, Alfred, 21, 104, 
148, 167, 191, 192 



Rawlinson, Henry C, 96 
Renan, J. E., ill 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 177 
Robertson, Eric S., 55 
Robertson, J. M., 17 



Virgil, 181 

Walton, Isaac, 129 
Webster, Daniel, 97 
Wilson, President, 114, 149, 187 
Winchester, C. T., 15 



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